Category: guantanamo

January 20, 2022

‘It’s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End’

Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Pardiss Kebriaei about Guantánamo prisoners for the January 14, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3

AP via Buffalo News (1/10/22)

Janine Jackson: On January 10, Associated Press’ “Today in History” feature highlighted January 10, 2002, when, it said, “Marines began flying hundreds of Al Qaeda prisoners in Afghanistan to a US base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

Twenty years on from the opening of that monument to the lawlessness and cruelty and racism of the US after September 11, 2001, and media are still shorthanding Guantánamo detainees as Al Qaeda prisoners.

A bigger problem is US news media’s erratic attention to the continued operation of a military prison specifically designed to be beyond the reach of US law, holding only Muslim men and boys, most of whom were never charged with anything, much less convicted.

Even after the official end of the war on Afghanistan, the sense one gets of Guantánamo from the press is that it’s lamentable, yet somehow unchangeable. Outrageous, yet somehow acceptable.

Keeping it out of the US public sight and mind was part of government’s plan for Guantánamo. Some people have been resisting that effort along with defending detainees’ rights for many years now, including our guest. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Pardiss Kebriaei.

Pardiss Kebriaei: Thank you so much, Janine.

JJ: Around January 11, the official 20-year mark, people may have seen headlines that a US government review panel has approved the release of five men from Guantánamo. That sounds like motion, like movement. Many people, I think, may not understand the tremendous, maybe unbridgeable, gulf between “approved for release” and leaving Guantánamo.

PK: It is a very good thing that those men have been cleared. They should have been cleared, or probably could have been cleared, years ago. But under the Trump administration, for four years, there was just very little movement of any kind on Guantánamo. So things are finally picking up again this year under the Biden administration.

But yes, there’s a very big distance between being approved for transfer, which means basically that every government agency with a stake in these detentions has looked at its case files on these men, heard from them, and determined that their detention is not necessary. That’s significant, obviously. But there have been men who were cleared for release years ago under the Obama administration who are still sitting in Guantánamo.

So yeah, the work right now is to transfer those men out, for the government to find countries for them to be sent to, either send them home–and in some cases they can be sent home–or to find third resettlement countries for them, and then to continue this process, which is underway, of approving for transfer the men who remain.

At this point, 20 years on from 9/11, those processes shouldn’t really be necessary. A certain number of detainees at Guantánamo, the majority, who have never been charged and will never be charged by the government: The government has had 20 years to determine whether it’s going to bring charges against them, and it has not. So more than half of the men at Guantánamo are in that category. Administrative review processes really at this point should not be necessary for the government to decide, to determine, that continuing detention into year 21, 22 and on is not necessary. But that is the process it’s undertaking, and it just needs to continue it and finish it, and begin the work of transferring men out now. It is, as you said, and as I’ve said, 20 years, two decades, of detention, and it needs to end.

JJ: Just for clarity, these men have to be transferred to other countries. It seems to me, if you just think about it, people who’ve been held without charge for decades now have been declared not to be a threat; why are we still in charge of where they live afterwards? What are these rules that govern where they can go, and why can’t they come to the US?

PK: By law, there’s a ban on transferring them to certain countries, and certainly to bringing them to the United States for any reason, even for prosecution. So there are legal obstacles that the United States Congress has erected to where they can go.

But despite those obstacles–I mean, those have existed for a long time, and transfers have happened by the dozens before; today we’re talking about a very small number of people who remain at Guantánamo. It’s actually, for as many ways as we can lament the fact that it still exists, I’ve been reflecting on how remarkable it actually is where we are, which is from a population of nearly 800 in the early 2000s, in the early years of the prison, to 39 men today.

That’s remarkable, and that’s the work of pressure, the work of organizers, journalists, advocates, lawyers, the men themselves, really, in surviving this long. I mean, it’s not the usual trajectory for prisons to empty, and it has.

So today we’re talking about a very small number of people. And, again, nearly half of whom have been approved for transfer by the United States itself. So this is not at this point insurmountable work. It can be done. Third countries need to be found in many cases, or people can just be repatriated. But that’s work that has happened before, and can happen again. Today I think it’s just a matter of, as usual, a bit of politics and will, and whether and how to make this a real priority for the Biden administration, admittedly in the middle of a lot of crisis.

JJ: Right.

PK: Right, I mean, there is context here, and I think everyone understands that. But that can’t continue to delay the work of finally shutting the prison down. It can be done, and it needs to happen. Twenty years is enough. It’s been enough for a long time.

JJ: Is there a real disagreement? Because we see some finger-pointing that Congress is what’s holding it up, that if Biden would just act, something could happen. What is behind the inertia, or who really does have the power? Does it require a multipart effort?

PK: No, it really doesn’t, I think. This is work that can reside in the Biden administration. It’s largely the work of quickly continuing to approve people for transfer, if that’s the process the administration feels it needs to undertake. Although lawyers have said for a long time that at this point, 20 years on, for the men the government has never charged and has no intention of charging, it really needs no further process.

JJ: Right.

Pardiss Kebriaei: “There’s wide acknowledgement and understanding that now is the time to finally finish the work of closing the prison.” (image: Witness to Guantánamo)

PK: It sort of speaks for itself that they remain uncharged and in this category for 20 years. But anyway, for the government to complete its review process, if that’s what it’s doing, and to find third countries, or to repatriate the people that it is clearing, that’s work that can happen by the administration, by the State Department.

I think the reason it has not, frankly, is a matter of getting their bearings internally and a lot of crisis and chaos that I think the Biden administration inherited. But I think there’s wide acknowledgement and understanding that now is the time to finally finish the work of closing the prison, and that it can be done; it’s just a matter of doing it.

And there are right now 18 men who are sitting in Guantánamo, have been there for decades, and are approved for transfer, third countries can be found for those men, need to be found for those men. There are countries the government sent people to by the dozens under the Obama administration. There were dozens of people sent to Oman, to Saudi Arabia, to other countries in the past, and the same can be done. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a matter of finding individual placements for every single person.

That said, I think that one lesson of transfers in the past is that real care needs to be taken, also, with where people are resettled and the conditions in which they land and the support they have. These are people who have been treated brutally in all the ways that we know and have been documented, and need real support in order to recover, I don’t know, but just to reintegrate. So care needs to be taken.

But it can be done. The government has transferred dozens of people to countries before, and the same can be done now. So it’s really just work that can largely reside in the administration, in the Biden administration, and it’s just a matter of doing it now.

JJ: We may, if that action is taken, we’ll be hearing at some point about the lesson, about what we learned from Guantánamo, about what it meant. And I think many listeners, particularly younger listeners, may not have a real sense of the unprecedented nature, and just the science fiction-y nature, of Guantánamo. So if we could just return, briefly, to that first principle, the fact that it was put not on US soil, not just to kind of keep reporters from being too inclined to investigate it–the hurdles for journalists have always been high–but there was an idea that if the US was holding foreigners outside of the US, that US courts couldn’t do anything about it. When we talk about this aura of lawlessness, that was built-in and intentional.

PK: That’s right. It is true that there have been a lot of things about Guantánamo that are particular: the remote nature of it, the really overt way that in the beginning the Bush administration denied people any even theoretical rights, the really overt kinds of torture that happened and were talked about in terms of methods. So there are certainly things that were very overt and brutal and particular to Guantánamo and, at the same time, I think anyone who has been exposed to or in or touched the criminal legal system in the United States, or prison in the United States, knows torture is not unique to Guantánamo, prolonged detention is not unique to Guantánamo, the lack of due process is not unique to Guantánamo.

And so I’ve sort of resisted–and a lot of us doing this work, advocates, lawyers alike, have resisted–this notion that Guantánamo is exceptional. I think what has made it exceptional is the way that all these things that we do in the United States, by the thousands and the millions and historically, came together in this particular way, in this particular prison and in this particular time against this group of people.

So I like to say it is very particular, but not exceptional. And that doesn’t take away at all from the brutality of what people have been through, and the harm of it, and that it is as wrong and depraved at Guantánamo as it is in prisons in the United States. And I think that’s not a new idea. I think there have been a lot of us organizers and advocates, like I was saying, who understand that now, and who have the broader context for the way that we treat and punish people we deem to be threats in some form.

But we can hold both, to say that it isn’t exceptional and it’s depraved and it needs to end and it matters. It doesn’t matter more than the imprisonment of a client I have in the United States who’s serving a life without parole sentence in Pennsylvania State Prison. But it matters as well. It’s and, not but.

JJ: Yeah. And finally, as with the deeper problems with the criminal legal system in this country, it seems sometimes to be missed in reporting that Guantánamo harmed and harms not only the people trapped there, but the system within it operates, the rule of law. If those things aren’t jokes to us, then this is a concern for everyone, and not simply a story about some hundreds of unfortunate men.

Sharqawi Al Hajj

PK: Absolutely. And I’ve reflected on this more recently, just the circles of harm. And it harms us in terms of law and democracy and human rights and all of that, and I don’t mean to sort of be dismissive about those things; those matter. But on a human level, there are circles of harm around this prison, as there are around every prison in America.

I think about the men that I have met and represent, a man who’s still there 20 years on, his name is Sharqawi Al Hajj, he’s 47 and he’s from Yemen. We could talk about the particular cruelty of his experience in Guantánamo today, not knowing, still not knowing, whether and when he might be released, or if he’s going to die there. So there’s something, like I said, very particular about the indefinite nature of detention.

But it’s not just him. It’s his family, it’s that circle of people. It’s people at Guantánamo, the staff, the guards who’ve had to guard the prison, and the medical staff who’ve had to follow orders to force-feed hunger-striking detainees, and advocates who have traveled down to the base for years and had to sit across from people who’ve suffered torture. There are reverberations of all these things and, so yes, it’s more than just the individual inside. There’s a whole world of people on the outside who are affected, and carry the pain and trauma of Guantánamo, and that’s part of why it’s so important to remove these sites from the landscape.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Pardiss Kebriaei, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can follow their work online at CCRJustice.org. Pardiss Kebriaei, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PK: Thank you so much for having me, Janine.

The post ‘It’s 20 Years of Detention and It Needs to End’ appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 16, 2022

Even After Release, Guantánamo Survivors Live Under Surveillance and in Anguish

It is a sad fact that it requires a major anniversary, two decades on from the arrival of the first prisoners in hoods and orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray prison, for the media and the U.S. public to pay attention to Guantánamo and the 39 men who remain imprisoned there.

The 741 men who have been released have been almost entirely forgotten by the public. The truth is that the U.S. has largely washed its hands of those it tortured and imprisoned without charge or trial for years on end, outsourcing its responsibility to support the reentry of these men to other countries, usually in the Global South, in some cases with fatal consequences.

I work for the only project in the world that is solely dedicated to assisting people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo to rebuild their lives — a project run by the human rights charity Reprieve. Many of the men we’ve assisted have been dropped by the U.S. into a country they’ve never been to before, where they have no contacts or networks and possibly don’t even speak the language.

Our research shows that almost one in three detainees who have been resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status documents. And even those who are granted residency find that rather than receive the support they need, they are stigmatized and kept under surveillance.

Often, host countries don’t allow the family of the former detainee to join him or even visit, after families have already been kept apart for so long. In one of the most heart-breaking cases I’ve worked on, the host country refused visit requests from the former detainee’s mother for five years, and by the time they finally acquiesced, she had died, having not seen her son for more than 20 years.

Deprived of citizenship or residency rights, people who were previously imprisoned in Guantánamo cannot get a job, access health care (including psychological support), education and other vital services. They may not be able to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and if living in a country with checkpoints, can’t pass through them. Without this most basic passport to participation in society, they are effectively confined to the shadows.

The program that I work for, called “Life After Guantánamo,” tries to help survivors of Guantánamo living in these dire circumstances. Founded by Reprieve in 2009, the program has helped 130 men living in 29 countries.

Reprieve has legally represented more than 80 Guantánamo detainees and helped more people secure release from the prison than any other organization. Through the Life After Guantánamo program, we request that governments give people who were formerly held in the prison the tools needed to rebuild their lives, or, failing that, we seek to do so ourselves. With support, many detainees, whether repatriated to their home countries or resettled in host countries, have been able to start that process.

Yet even detainees with those comparative “success stories” continue to be haunted by the time they spent in U.S. custody. “It feels like I am still there, I just changed for the big Guantánamo,” one former prisoner told me. “When I close my eyes I am back in Guantánamo, so I can’t sleep,” confided another.

I visited one detainee after he’d been resettled who wouldn’t leave his new apartment. Although physically he was a free man, mentally he was still imprisoned. Detained in Guantánamo for 15 years since he was only 18 years old, he had become so institutionalized that he couldn’t cope with freedom. With support, he’s now learned the language of his new home country, formed friendships and is undergoing vocational training.

Many aren’t given that chance. In some cases, men are released from Guantánamo only to be immediately imprisoned again. Twenty-three men were transferred to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), expecting to live as free men, but were detained upon their arrival in horrific conditions when the UAE reneged on assurances given to the U.S. Most of them have been forcibly repatriated to Yemen, despite concerns about their safety. One man, Ravil Mingazov, could be repatriated to Russia where he faces persecution and, as confirmed by the United Nations, a “substantial risk of torture.”

When Senegal deported two former detainees to Libya, they immediately disappeared into militia-run prisons. Although they have since been found and released, they are at risk of being detained again. Former detainees resettled in Kazakhstan and Mauritania died of medical problems because they could not access health care as they had not been afforded basic rights.

Most resettlements were negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency, and once Donald Trump took over, the U.S. appeared to completely disengage from what was happening to them once resettled, giving host countries license to mistreat and abuse them.

President Joe Biden can end the lottery that determines whether people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo are given any chance at life. He can ensure that resettlements and repatriations are done safely, without former detainees being put at risk of imprisonment or persecution, that they are afforded citizenship or rights as residents and that their loved ones are able to join them. These demands should be central to the campaign to close Guantánamo, because Guantánamo can continue to imprison, and even kill, after men escape its four walls.

Disgracefully, the U.S. offers no compensation to these men for the unspeakable horrors they suffered in U.S. custody. The very least the Biden administration can do is ensure that once released from Guantánamo, former prisoners are actually given the opportunity to know freedom.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
January 15, 2022

Enduring Stain: The Guantánamo Military Prison Turns Twenty

Anniversaries for detention centres, concentration camps and torture facilities are not the relishable calendar events in the canon of human worth. But not remembering them, when they were used, and how they continue being used, would be unpardonable amnesia.

On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners of the absurdly named “War on Terror”, declared with such confused understanding by US President George W. Bush, began arriving at the newly constructed Camp X-Ray prison at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay. Structurally crude, it was intended as a temporary facility, remote and out of sight. Instead, it became a permanent and singular contribution of US political and legal practice, withering due process and civil liberties along the way.

After two decades, 779 prisoners have spent time there, many of whom were low level operatives of minimal importance. Prior to being sent to the camp, the detainees endured abductions, disappearances, and torture in US-operated centres in allied countries. The previous director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Aspel, had more than a nodding acquaintance with this process, having overseen operations at a black site in Thailand specialising in interrogating al-Qaeda suspects.

Guantánamo Bay was a mad, cruel experiment about how legal limbos and forged purgatories of the law can function to dehumanise and degrade. It was developed by people supposedly versed in a liberal legal tradition but keen to make exceptions in battling a supposedly novel enemy. The detainees were deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” – as if there was such a thing – thereby placing them outside the formal protections of humanitarian law. They were subjected to sleep deprivation, forced feeding, lengthy detainment, beatings, stress positions and an assortment of other torture methods.

In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney sneered at suggestions that the inmates were being mistreated. “They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want. There wasn’t any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we’re treating these people.”

The closure of the facility has been constantly urged with minimal return. It was one of the electoral messages of the presidential campaign in 2007. Barack Obama and his rival, Hillary Clinton, endorsed the idea. As did the Republican contender for the White House, John McCain. As Obama declared at the time, “In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious values.”

A joint US-European Union statement from June 15, 2009 noted, with welcome, the decision by President Obama to affect a closure by January 22 the following year. But it also acknowledged what has been a persistent problem: returning detainees to their countries of origin or a third country that might be willing to accept them.

In the dying days of the Obama administration, the facility, despite a reduction in the inmate population, remained functional. Congress proved recalcitrant and obstructive on the issue but there was also opposition to the closure from various arms of government, including the Pentagon. Lee Wolosky, formerly Obama’s Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure, could only marvel darkly at this seemingly indestructible piece of legal infrastructure. “In large part,” he wrote, this mess had been “self-inflicted – a result of our own decisions to engage in torture, hold detainees indefinitely without charge, set up dysfunctional military commissions and attempt to avoid oversight by the federal courts.”

In 2016, Donald Trump, the eventual victor of that year’s presidential contest, repeatedly insisted that he would “load it with some bad dudes”. In 2018, he signed a new executive order keeping the military prison open, reiterating the line that terrorists were not merely “criminals” but “unlawful enemy combatants”. Releasing any such individuals from Guantánamo had been, he observed gravely, a mistake. “In the past, we have foolishly released hundred and hundreds of dangerous terrorists only to meet them again on the battlefield, including the ISIS leader, [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, who we captured, who we had, who we released.”

On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the camp’s opening, Agnès Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, was yet another voice to urge its closure. “President Joe Biden, like President Barack Obama before him, has promised to close it, but so far has failed to do so.” She insisted that each detainee’s case be resolved, be it through transfer and release, or via “a regularly constituted federal court without recourse to the death penalty.”

Despite being an enduring blot on the country’s credibility, the facility remains ingloriously open, a reminder that there are legal provinces where the US is willing to detain people indefinitely, without trial or scrutiny. Thirty-nine men remain, thirteen of whom are in indefinite detention. This is despite the latter having had their transfers out of the facility approved a decade ago. The calls for the military prison’s closure reach occasional crescendos, but these eventually diminish before the machinery of stifling bureaucracy. Tragically, there is every risk that the Guantánamo experiment will be replicated rather than abolished. Such creations, once brought into being, can prove deathless.
The post Enduring Stain: The Guantánamo Military Prison Turns Twenty first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
January 14, 2022

Pardiss Kebriaei on Guantánamo Prisoners

Prisoners of Guantánamo (photo: Shane T. McCoy/US Navy)

This week on CounterSpin: As we pass the grim milestone of 20 years of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, even Michael Lehnert, the Marine general who set the camp up, calls for it to close, says it shouldn’t have opened, that it’s an affront to US values. And yet here we are.

The number of Muslim men and boys in Guantánamo has shrunk from some 800 to 39—that’s meaningful. But when you read an offhand reference to those men as “awaiting justice,” one wonders: What do reporters imagine “justice” might mean to people charged with no crime, deprived of liberty unlawfully for decades, in a place designed to keep them from accessing justice, and to keep anyone else from hearing about them, much less questioning the processes that put them there?

We are a long way from understanding the full meaning of Guantánamo. But we can get the remaining detainees out. Our guest says that’s something that can happen and should happen, now. Pardiss Kebriaei is senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She’ll join us to talk abut how closing Guantánamo is not everything we can do, but it is something we can do, and should.

CounterSpin220114Kebriaei.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Lani Guinier, Desmond Tutu, and Covid and disability.

CounterSpin220114Banter.mp3

The post Pardiss Kebriaei on Guantánamo Prisoners appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
January 13, 2022

Guantánamo Isn’t Ancient History. It Has Become a “Forever Prison.”

This week marks 20 years since the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. It is not yet closed, as I had hoped it would be a decade ago, but this serves as a week of remembrance for all who have suffered in the U.S.’s illegal offshore prison.

As a young lawyer, I first traveled to Guantánamo in 2006 to represent three Uyghurs, including a child, held without charge or trial. I have returned many times in each year since, and represented dozens of other detained men, from Somaliland to Baltimore, in federal courts, military commissions and administrative hearings. I’ve seen about everything there is to see when it comes to challenging unlawful detentions at Guantánamo.

This notorious military installation has changed since the first planeload of men arrived from Afghanistan a generation ago, but the lawlessness from which it originated and the human suffering it has caused endure. As Sen. Dick Durbin remarked recently, Guantánamo is “where due process goes to die.”

My first trip to “the Island” was profoundly disorienting and disturbing. After a rough flight to the naval station on a charter plane so decrepit it had to stop midway from Fort Lauderdale to be serviced at a seemingly abandoned airstrip in the Bahamas, my co-counsel, our interpreter and I were met by a phalanx of U.S. servicemembers with guns and K-9s. Throughout the next few days, we were searched repeatedly, had our client meetings interrupted for no apparent reason except to disrupt our work and were escorted everywhere like wayward children.

This was years after our clients arrived at Guantánamo, but during the height of the “war on terror.” This was the time of shackled men in orange jumpsuits, clients showing up to meetings bearing signs of physical abuse, and denigration of Islam including desecration of the Quran. It was also a time of excessive secrecy. We did not know who was detained at Guantánamo; men were called by internment serial numbers, not their names. We learned who was held, bit by bit, when our clients showed up to meetings with lists of other men in nearby cells who wanted lawyers to challenge their indefinite detention or call their families to say they were alive.

Back then, the U.S. considered all detainees hard-core “terrorists” who would kill if they had the opportunity, and detainee lawyers were not welcome at Guantánamo. We were the enemy.

Fast-forward to 2012, and those narratives had been debunked. Most of the 780 men brought to Guantánamo had been released, including my Uyghur clients, who the government had concluded many years earlier had been captured by mistake. Guantánamo was also no longer exceptional. Indefinite military detention was entrenched. As I wrote then, it had become part of the American landscape. It had achieved a degree of normalcy, which, admittedly, was sometimes difficult to shake for those of us who had been traveling to the prison for so many years. As far as some of the new, younger guards were aware, Guantánamo had always existed. Defense lawyers were no longer uncommon or even necessarily unwelcome at the base. The Supreme Court had since settled the right of the detained men to challenge their detention in court, which, if nothing else, ensured their continued access to lawyers like me.

Although secrecy still predominated (as it does today), particularly surrounding “high-value” detainees like my clients Majid Khan and Guled Duran, who were transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA detention in September 2006, we now had freer access to the detained men. We litigated their legal cases vigorously and, at least initially, successfully. We also worked closely to resolve detainee cases with the Obama administration, which had ordered the closure of Guantánamo and substantially reduced the detainee population. We traveled the globe to encourage U.S. allies to resettle detained men.

In January 2012, however, when faced with other political challenges, President Obama turned his back on Guantánamo and surrendered closure issues to his political opponents in Congress. Transfers stopped for two years, and he struggled to regain momentum toward closure until a widespread hunger strike at the prison refocused those efforts during his second term. The result was clear: The remaining men who had cheered Obama’s election began to lose hope. I saw their pain in the eyes of my Algerian client, Djamel Ameziane, whose approval for transfer the government had long concealed from the public. But Ameziane was one of the fortunate to leave the prison after transfers resumed in late 2013. Others were not so lucky, and, despite a resurgence of transfers in the final years of the Obama administration, many men were left in limbo when the Trump administration came into office and transfers halted once again.

Today, 39 men remain held indefinitely at Guantánamo, despite the end of the Afghanistan conflict in which many of them were ostensibly apprehended. Twelve are involved in military commission proceedings, including Majid Khan, who will complete his commission sentence in February and then need to be transferred. The remaining 27 are awaiting transfer, some of them already approved unanimously to leave more than a decade ago by the relevant U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Many are convinced they will die at Guantánamo, alone and forgotten, never having seen the inside of a courtroom.

But I was wrong when I wrote about these men a decade ago: They have not lost all hope. The prison that Amnesty International once branded the “gulag of our times” has become their “forever prison.” Yet the human spirit is difficult to crush. The remaining men may be largely resigned to their fate, but most retain at least a glimmer of hope that one day they will be free.

Whether that dream will be realized is now up to President Biden. As with two of his three predecessors in the Oval Office, he says he is committed to closing Guantánamo as a matter of policy. But unlike those predecessors, the Biden administration has not taken substantial steps toward achieving that objective. During his first year in office, Biden has approved several detainees to leave Guantánamo, but transferred only one man home to Morocco, a transfer which was negotiated at the end of the Obama administration. At that rate, Guantánamo may never close. Biden has all the legal authority he needs to increase the pace of transfers; the question, as with each of the last four presidents who have served since Guantánamo opened in 2002, is whether he will use that authority.

For those detainees not yet awaiting transfer, contested military commission cases continue to provide a thin veneer of legal process to maintain the status quo and cover up prior CIA torture of the defendants — abuse that a panel of senior military officers recently denounced as a “stain on the moral fiber of America” and a “source of shame” for the United States. As was clear from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, there is bipartisan consensus that the commissions have failed to achieve accountability for anyone. The only way forward is to negotiate the resolution of those cases. Whether that will happen is up to the Biden administration, which refused to send anyone to the hearing to discuss the issue or Guantánamo closure policy.

For many who don’t follow Guantánamo closely, the prison is ancient history. They assume it was closed by Obama. I wish that were so. Guantánamo never should have been opened, and the truth is that I never imagined 16 years ago devoting most of my legal career to its closure.

Many people ask why I continue after so many years. In their minds, perhaps, pursuing Guantánamo closure is Sisyphean. The answer is simple: Guantánamo still exists, and there are 39 men still detained there without due process of law. I still hope that one day Guantánamo is closed, but until that happens, I will not give up.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
January 11, 2022

Twenty Years Of Barbarism At Guantánamo: Biden Could End It But Lacks The Political Will

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The first “high-value detainee” at Guantánamo military prison was approved for transfer a day before the detention camp marked the 20th anniversary of confining prisoners in the “war on terrorism.”

According to lawyers from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) who represented him, Guled Hassan Duran was captured in Djibouti in March 2004. The CIA renditioned him to a secret prison site, where he was tortured and abused prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in 2006. He was designated by President Barack Obama’s review task force for indefinite detention, even though he was not charged with a crime.

Duran is a citizen of Somalia with “prior residence in Germany and Sweden.” Congress prohibited the United States government from transferring any Guantánamo prisoners to Libya, Somalia, Syria, or Yemen in 2015. Because he cannot return to Somalia, it could be several years before he is released to a country willing to accept him.

Thirty-nine prisoners remain indefinitely detained at Guantánamo. They have been in confinement for the past 15-to-20 years without charge or trial.

The withdrawal of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan in 2021 gives the U.S. government even less of a justification for keeping the prison open. However, President Joe Biden’s administration has displayed little to no political will to close Guantánamo once and for all.

Or to put it another way, Biden has not demonstrated that his administration will make sure he finishes a job he started when he was part of the Obama administration in 2009 and they formally pledged to close Guantánamo.

JTF Guantanamo photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Elisha Dawkins

‘This Monstrous Creation Of The U.S. Government’

CCR, a lead organization in the fight to shut down the detention camp, declared, “For 20 years, this monstrous creation of the U.S. government has been intentionally inflicting human suffering.”

“Today, we think of the victims: the 780 Muslim men and boys, who have faced injustice and brutality, from torture to indefinite detention to sham trials to force feeding to profound indifference, if not hostility, from U.S. political leaders.”

“We also think of the families who have been without their loved ones for so long and do not know when or if they will see them again,” CCR added.

Twenty-seven prisoners at Guantánamo have never been charged. CCR estimates that 26 prisoners survived CIA torture. Five of them, including Duran, are represented by CCR.

Sufiyan Barhoumi, who is from Algeria, was cleared for transfer in 2016, but the the Obama administration failed to transfer him out of Guantánamo before President Donald Trump was inaugurated. He was brought to the detention camp in June 2002.

Brought to Guantánamo in 2004, CCR says Sharqawi Al Hajj, who is from Yemen, was tortured at “two CIA black sites.” As a result, he suffers from severe health problems that could result in “total bodily collapse.” The Biden administration approved him for transfer in June 2021, however, he cannot return to Yemen because of the congressional ban that Obama signed into law.

A Saudi citizen named Mohammed Al Qahtani was allegedly subject to CIA torture and rendition before he arrived at Guantánamo in February 2002. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia prior to this abuse. His mental health is “deteriorating rapidly,” according to CCR. But he remains in confinement despite the fact that Qahtani is charged with no crime.

In fact, in 2009, Susan Crawford, a U.S. Defense Department official who was the head of the military commissions, admitted the U.S. “tortured” Qahtani.

“The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent,” Crawford told the Washington Post. “You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge.”

Qahtani is apparently the only person the U.S. government ever publicly admitted they tortured. Yet when CCR pushed for the release of videos and photos of Qahtani to show Americans evidence of systematic abuse, the Obama administration blocked their release in federal court.

U.S. Central Command Chief of Staff Karl Horst argued the release of photos and video would endanger “U.S. military personnel, diplomats and aid workers serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere” and aid the “recruitment and financing of extremist and insurgent groups” because “enemy forces in Afghanistan” and elsewhere “have previously used videos and photographs [particularly of U.S. forces interacting with detainees] out of context to incite the civilian population and influence government officials.”

The media published images in 2004 “relating to allegations of abuse of Iraqi detainees” (i.e. Abu Ghraib) and media reported in 2005 on “alleged incidents of mishandling of the Koran at Guantánamo,” Horst added.

To be clear, the Obama administration argued evidence of torture had to be kept secret because it would upset groups the U.S. had designated as terrorist organizations. They even told the courts the photos and videos “could be manipulated to show greater mistreatment than actually occurred, or change the chronology of actual events” in order to help the Pentagon hide torture and abuse. (The courts shamefully accepted these secrecy arguments.)

The First Survivor Of CIA Torture At Black Site Prisons To Speak Out—While Still In Custody

The Biden administration has yet to “re-establish the special envoy office in the State Department dedicated to the prison’s closure,” according to Amnesty International.

“On the contrary, the administration has just announced plans to build a new courtroom at Guantánamo to continue the work by the military commissions – the very opposite of a blueprint to shut the place down,” Amnesty stated on the 20th anniversary.

As Amnesty noted, in 2021, the world heard horrific stories of torture and abuse from Majid Khan, Abu Zubaydah, and Mohamedou Slahi, who was the subject of a film called “The Mauritanian.”

Khan is a Pakistani eligible for release in February 2022. He had political asylum status in the United States before he was brought to Guantánamo in 2006.

CCR, which represents him, says he is “the first survivor of the CIA torture program to discuss in public his experiences at black sites.” [PDF]

Eight U.S. military officers sentenced Khan to 26 years in prison in October 2021. The New York Times called it “symbolic” because he became a “government cooperator” when he pled guilty in February 2012. Seven of the eight officers recommended clemency for Khan.

A sentencing statement featuring brutal descriptions of his torture and abuse was read by Khan in a courtroom at Guantánamo.

Majid Khan (Photo: Center for Constitutional Rights)

“I can say for certain that I was subjected to water torture that induced the feeling of drowning several times,” Khan stated. “It is hard to describe, or put into words, how it felt to be waterboarded. With a hood wrapped around my face and water pouring down my throat, I coughed, gagged, screamed, and couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was going to die.”

When Khan was brought to the Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, the CIA removed his clothes and left him cold and naked. He was given no food and afraid to drink the water the CIA officers provided.

“I was periodically and repeatedly doused with water,” Khan recalled. “The room was pitch black, but I could feel tiny bugs, smaller than mosquitoes, biting me repeatedly until I bled. With my hands shackled, I couldn’t swat the bugs or scratch the sores they left. There was also music played constantly at deafening volumes. I remember thinking the room was shaking.”

“I was hung at a height where I was able to bend my legs slightly, but I was not able to sit or kneel. I remember the intense feeling of uncertainty that I felt; it was horrifying. I was so scared. I had no choice but to urinate on myself and the floor.”

Khan continued, “I was so terrified that I had diarrhea. My back and entire body was in a constant state of excruciating pain, partly because I had preexisting back problems. I was left for days with the smell of urine and feces that had collected on my body.”

The CIA brought Khan to a secret prison referred to as “Detention Site Orange,” where he was held for a longer amount of time before his transfer to Guantánamo.

“In the month of September 2004,” Khan says he was “raped by the CIA medics.” He was engaged in a series of hunger strikes. “While being restrained, they inserted tubes or objects into my anus against my will. This was different than the enemas they had previously used.”

“Sometimes it was done in my cell. Other times I was restrained on a stretcher and moved to another room. In either location, I was restrained very tightly and securely by at least two guards. A CIA medic was there to administer the insertions, but it was not a medical procedure.”

Khan added, “I remember one time in my cell I asked the medic why he was doing this, and he whispered with viciousness, ‘You’re a fucking terrorist.’ They used green garden hoses and one end was connected to the faucet as they ‘rehydrated me.’”

“I remember feeling immense pressure in my bowels, a pain I had never felt. I couldn’t stop myself from evacuating my bowels. I think these forced rectal insertions were done to make it appear like I had eaten, digested food, and used the toilet. To this day, I experience extreme discomfort from hemorrhoids as a result of my treatment.”

Faced with repeated torture, Khan told his captors what they wanted. He was scared. He wanted the torture to stop. He made false statements to interrogators in order to convince them he was “compliant and cooperative.”

Khan continued to lie when he arrived at Guantánamo because it renewed his fears and forced him to relive prior traumas and experiences at the hands of CIA interrogators. It wasn’t until October 2007 that he finally felt comfortable enough to tell the truth to his defense team and take responsibility for some of what led to his capture.

“Mr. Khan has been held without basic due process under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, he was held without charge or legal representation for nine years until 2012 and held without final sentencing until October 2021,” U.S. military officers wrote in their clemency letter [PDF].

The officers acknowledged Khan was “subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests.”

“Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America. The treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”

Further Reading: Guantanamo Whistleblowers Who Spoke Up Against a Legal Black Hole

The post Twenty Years Of Barbarism At Guantánamo: Biden Could End It But Lacks The Political Will appeared first on Shadowproof.

This post was originally published on Shadowproof.
January 11, 2022

Former Army Chaplain at Guantánamo Was Jailed There Himself

Twenty years ago today, the U.S. military began imprisoning Muslim men at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. We speak with the prison’s former Muslim chaplain, James Yee, who was jailed and held in solitary confinement for 76 days after being falsely accused of espionage. All charges were eventually dropped, and he received an honorable discharge. Yee describes how boys as young as 12 to 15 years old were treated as enemy combatants on the prison complex and the widespread Islamophobia that put even Muslim Americans under heavy surveillance. “During my time I was there, it was clear that these individuals were not in any way associated with terrorism whatsoever,” says Yee.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, as we continue to look at this 20th anniversary of the opening of the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo. It opened 20 years ago today.

We’re joined now by former Army chaplain Captain James Yee. He was one of the first Muslim chaplains commissioned to the prison in 2002 by the U.S. Army. But less than a year after serving there, he was accused of espionage by the military and faced charges so severe that he was threatened with the death penalty. He was arrested and imprisoned for 76 days in solitary confinement. The military leaked information about the case to the press, and the media went on a feeding frenzy. Chaplain Yee was vilified on the airwaves as a traitor and accused of being a mole inside the Army. Then the military’s case began to unravel. The charges were eventually reduced and, eight months later, dropped altogether. He ultimately received an honorable discharge. Chaplain Yee wrote about his experiences in a book titled For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire. James Yee has long called for the closure of Guantánamo, joins us now from his home in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

James Yee, welcome back to Democracy Now! We covered your case from the beginning. Why don’t you start off by telling your own story, how you came to be at Guantánamo, being a chaplain for the Muslim men who were held there, and then what happened to you?

JAMES YEE: Great, great. Yeah, first of all, Amy, Juan, and also to Mansoor and Moazzam, thanks for having me join you today on the program.

But I converted to Islam back in the early ’90s, and I was already in the military as a graduate of West Point, serving in the Air Defense Artillery as a young lieutenant, and then, after converting to Islam, thought I could fulfill a pretty unique role in becoming a chaplain in the U.S. military, because at that time there were no Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military. And I entered — I reentered active duty in early 2001 as a Muslim chaplain. And in the immediate post-9/11 aftermath, I was someone who the U.S. Army Public Affairs looked to to handle media requests that dealt with anything that had to do with Muslims who were serving in the U.S. military, especially following the tragic attacks on 9/11 where many of these Muslim servicemembers were experiencing backlash.

So, my name was out there not only in U.S. Army Public Affairs but in the Department of Defense, also the State Department. And so, when we started bombarding Afghanistan and opened the prison camp at Guantánamo, I was earmarked for that assignment down in Guantánamo. And I would arrive to the prison camp in early November, almost exactly at the same time that the now-infamous Major General Geoffrey Miller took command of the Joint Task Force. And like you said in your intro, I was there for 10 months. I was supposed to have been there six months, involuntary extended another six months. But at the 10-month mark, then I was secretly arrested.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, James Yee, could you talk about, from your perspective, what Guantánamo represents to the rest of the world and the impact that the treatment of the prisoners there has had in the Muslim world?

JAMES YEE: Yeah. So, Guantánamo, no doubt, is the international symbol of torture and prisoner abuse. And it continues today to damage the reputation of the United States. And I feel it also damages the relationships that the U.S. has even with our closest allies. By and large, I don’t know of any other nations around the world who are accepting of the U.S. continuing to operate this prison camp in Guantánamo.

But in my view, these are very important issues, because this has been around for now 20 years. We’re at the 20th anniversary of this prison camp. And one of the things I always like to point out is something that the late Colin Powell had stated. And he said that he would close Guantánamo not today, not tomorrow, but this afternoon. So, even someone who was part of the Bush administration that opened Guantánamo, from an insider’s perspective, even he saw the urgency of — that’s Colin Powell — of needing to close this prison camp immediately.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the issue that has not gotten a lot of attention, the question of the youthfulness of some of the detainees — basically children — what you know about that?

JAMES YEE: Yeah. So, during my time in Guantánamo, which was late 2002 through most of 2003, there were actually three young boys from Afghanistan who were brought to Guantánamo during that time. And they were ages 12 to 14 years old. They were termed “juvenile enemy combatants.” There were already juvenile enemy combatants at Guantánamo, according to the international standard, which would be under the age of 18. So, the policy at Guantánamo was that anyone who — any prisoner who was 15 years old or older were held in general population. And there were several. One that I recall very distinctly was Omar Khadr from Canada, and he was only 15 at the time. But these three younger prisoners were brought to Guantánamo during my time, and they were kept in a separate facility known as Camp Iguana. And I actually used to meet with them on a weekly basis. I had set up some basic sessions and courses on Islam that I would teach. And they had their own translator or interpreter, who had an Afghani background, that spoke their dialected language.

But they also went through things which I found disturbing. I wasn’t privy to witness how they were interrogated, but there were often times when the interrogators came during the time my sessions were taking place, and I was pushed aside. And following those sessions with interrogators, I saw that these young boys actually came back very disturbed. They had changed behaviors. They showed signs of anxiety. And they would recall things to me and the other guards that were overseeing their detention, things like how interrogators would come and they would promise them like nice things like ice cream and things like that, but then, for some reason, their punishment was they wouldn’t get that ice cream. Now, you’re talking about very youthful kids. And when you’re treating individuals like this, who are taken away from their home, taken away from their families, it had to have a devastating effect on their psyche.

AMY GOODMAN: James Yee, you’re a former U.S. Army captain. You graduated from West Point, a Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo. So, if you could finish your story? What happened there? We’re talking about a time when, what, 800 Muslim men, almost, were being held. And then you had the Muslim — you had Arabic interpreters. You had Arabic-language interrogators. Were you chaplain to all of them? And then, what happened to you? How did you end up getting imprisoned?

JAMES YEE: Yeah. So, my role as a chaplain, one, was chaplain to the prisoners who were all being held in Guantánamo. The numbers were upwards towards 660 around the time I was there. One of the things I also make a point of is, during that time in 2003, not one could be definitively connected to any terrorist attack or the attacks on 9/11. That wasn’t a reality, because anyone who was seriously suspected of being involved in terrorism weren’t brought to Guantánamo in 2003. They were put in those secret CIA black sites. And it wasn’t only until later, in 2006, when those 19 or so prisoners were brought to Guantánamo, after Bush closed down those CIA black sites. But during the time I was there, it was clear that these individuals were not in any way associated with terrorism whatsoever.

But my other role as a chaplain was to prisoners. And in that role, it was to ensure free exercise of worship and accommodation of religious practices for the prisoners there, and also fielding the complaints and concerns that prisoners had, and thereby providing them with a secondary channel of communication up the chain of command for those concerns and complaints.

Then I was chaplain to many American Muslims who served on this Joint Task Force, civilian and military. And by and large, most of these individuals were translators or interpreters, linguists. And we actually had a pretty vibrant, what you might call, congregation, in which we had the Friday worship service at the chapel, the Guantánamo chapel on Fridays. And that even raised suspicion amongst the command at Guantánamo, because we were all under surveillance. I recall seeing individuals who were associated with the FBI that were kind of monitoring our activities at the chapel. And I knew that these individuals were from the FBI because many of the translators worked for the intelligence operation and said, “Yeah, these guys who are hanging around the chapel are with the FBI.” So that raised suspicion.

So, there was this widespread Islamophobia or somehow some kind of fear that we, as American Muslims who were working for the Joint Task Force, were somehow being seditious. And that’s how I got targeted as the chaplain, because I was supposedly the ringleader. And after I was arrested, it also came to light that two other American Muslims who were down in Guantánamo working, one a civilian translator and one who was a U.S. Air Force translator, both also — both Arabic linguists, they were also arrested during the time I was. And it was being — and the media frenzy that you spoke about, or you mentioned earlier, was that I was the ringleader of some type of spy ring in Guantánamo working on behalf of who knows.

AMY GOODMAN: And how long you were held, and how you got out?

JAMES YEE: So, I was secretly arrested in September of 2003, for 76 days held in solitary confinement. I also was subjected to this process called sensory deprivation, where I had the goggles put over my eyes and the ear devices put over my ears to prevent me from hearing or seeing, which instilled fear in me, because I had saw how the prisoners at Guantánamo were subjected to sensory deprivation. And for me, this was an indication that I was also being put into this category of enemy combatant, where all of my rights could be stripped away, as they were stripped away from all of the prisoners down at Guantánamo.

And because I was a U.S. citizen, they put me into what you might call the stateside Guantánamo, which was the Consolidated Naval Brig, where President Bush was housing people he categorized as enemy combatants that were either U.S. citizens — and there were two, an individual named José Padilla and another named Yaser Hamdi — or an enemy combatant that had been taken into custody on U.S. soil, like Saleh al-Marri, who was in the United States legally and was put also in this prison. And I was housed alongside these individuals.

But long story short, all of the charges that were brought against me would eventually fade away. They eventually would, after having absolutely no evidence, even try to prosecute me on mishandling classified information, in which there was no evidence for that. And so the charges would be dropped. I was released, reinstated as a chaplain, sent back to Fort Lewis, Washington, after which, at the first opportunity, I resigned of my commission.

AMY GOODMAN: Wow. Well, we’re going to break and then come back to our discussion with James Yee, former U.S. Army captain who served as the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo before the military falsely accused him of spying and imprisoned him. All the charges were dropped. He received an honorable discharge. His book is called For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.

When we come back, we’ll speak to Mansoor Adayfi, the former Guantánamo prisoner who was held by the U.S. without charge for 14 years before being released in 2016, not to his own country but to Serbia. He would write a letter from his imprisonment in Guantánamo to the former chaplain, James Yee. Stay with us.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
December 27, 2021

Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) Speaks on Apartheid, Palestine, Climate Crisis and More

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African anti-apartheid icon, has died at the age of 90. In 1984 Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting to end white minority rule in South Africa. After the fall of apartheid, Archbishop Tutu chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he pushed for restorative justice. He was a leading voice for human rights and peace around the world. He opposed the Iraq War and condemned the Israeli occupation in Palestine, comparing it to apartheid South Africa. We reair two interviews Archbishop Tutu did on Democracy Now!, as well as two speeches on the Iraq War and the climate crisis.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour remembering Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The South African anti-apartheid icon died Sunday at the age of 90. In 1984, Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting to end white minority rule in South Africa. That same year, 1984, he traveled to Washington, where he denounced the Reagan administration’s support for South Africa’s apartheid government.

DESMOND TUTU: Apartheid is as evil, as immoral, as un-Christian, in my view, as Nazism. And in my view, the Reagan administration’s support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil and totally un-Christian, without remainder.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1988, Archbishop Tutu risked jail by organizing a boycott of regional elections in South Africa.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I urge Black people in this diocese not to vote in the October elections. And I hope that white Anglicans will join their Black fellow Anglicans in that action. I am aware of the penalties attaching to this call. I am not defying the government. I am obeying God.

AMY GOODMAN: After the fall of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first Black president, Archbishop Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he pushed for restorative justice. He would later become a vocal critic of the ANC, the African National Congress, under the leadership of Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. This is Bishop Tutu speaking in 2011.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Hey, Mr. Zuma, you and your government don’t represent me. You represent your own interests. And I’m warning you. I really am warning you, out of love. I am warning you like I warned the nationalists. I am warning you: One day we will start praying for the defeat of the ANC government.

AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Desmond Tutu also slammed the ANC in 2011 for not granting a visa to the Dalai Lama, who was invited to attend his 80th birthday.

Archbishop Tutu was a leading voice for human rights and peace around the world. He opposed the Iraq War. He condemned the Israeli occupation of Palestine, comparing it to apartheid South Africa. In 2014, he backed the Palestinian-led BDS, or boycott, sanctions and divestment movement. He also spoke against torture and the death penalty. In 2011, he recorded a video calling for the release of imprisoned African American journalist and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Mumia’s guilty verdict must be considered more than flawed. It is unacceptable. He has been denied the right to a new trial based on racial bias in jury selection, has faced years of prosecutorial and police misconduct and judicial bias.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, today we spend the rest of the hour hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his own words. We begin by going back to February 15, 2003, when Tutu spoke before a massive rally in New York to oppose the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: People marched and demonstrated, and the Berlin Wall fell, and communism was ended. People marched and demonstrated, and apartheid ended. And democracy and freedom were born. And now people are marching, and people are demonstrating, because people are saying no to war!

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: We say no to war!

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: The just war theory says you need a legitimate authority to declare and to wage war. Only the United Nations is that legitimate authority. Any other war is immoral. The just war says, “Have you exhausted all possible peaceful means?” And the world says, “No, we haven’t yet!” And any war before you have exhausted all possible peaceful means is immoral. And those who want to wage war against Iraq must know it would be an immoral war.

You know, those who are going to be killed in Iraq are not collateral damage. They are human beings of flesh and blood. They are children. They are mothers. They are brothers. They are grandfathers. You know what? They are our sisters and brothers, for we belong in one family. We are members of one family, God’s family, the human family. And how can we say we want to drop bombs on our sisters and brothers, on our children?

We said no to communism. We said no to apartheid. We said no to injustice. We said no to oppression. And we said yes to freedom, yes to democracy. Now I ask you: What do we say to war?

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I can’t hear you. What do you say to war?

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do you say to death and destruction?

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do you say to peace?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I can’t hear you. What do you say to peace?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do you say to life?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do you say to freedom?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do you say to compassion?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Well, we want to say, President Bush, listen to the voice of the people, for many times the voice of the people is the voice of God. Vox populi, vox dei. Listen to the voice of the people saying give peace a chance. Give peace a chance. And let’s say once more so that they can hear in the Pentagon, they can hear in White House: What do we say to war?

CROWD: No!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: What do we say to peace?

CROWD: Yes!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yeah!

AMY GOODMAN: The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressing the massive antiwar rally in New York on February 15, 2003, the day millions rocked the globe for peace. When we come back, we’ll hear the Nobel Peace Prize laureate talk about Guantánamo, torture and more. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “A Song for Bra Des Tutu” by Winston Mankunku Ngozi. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re continuing to remember the life and legacy of former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died Sunday at the age of 90. I interviewed him over the years. In 2004, I spoke to him at The Culture Project after a play about Guantánamo. I began by asking Archbishop Desmond Tutu what his response was to what was happening at Guantánamo.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I thought I knew what was taking place there, and I was quite shocked when I sat through the play yesterday, just how devastated I was. I was particularly so because I had such an awful sense of déjà vu. For someone coming from South Africa, you say, “But, I mean, that’s exactly what they were doing for exactly the same reasons that they gave.” I mean, you said, “Why do you detain people without trial? Why do you ban people as you are doing?” And the response from the South African government was, “Security of the state.” And anyone who questioned it would then be regarded, especially if you’re white, as being unpatriotic.

And I just want to say to you: Is this something that you want done in your name? Isn’t it time there was the same sense of outrage that people had about apartheid, which people should have had about the Holocaust? And what would happen if it was Americans held by some other country under these conditions? The point is, God has actually got no one. The god we worship is strange. They say this god is omnipotent, but God is also very weak. There’s not a great deal that God seems to be able to do without you.

AMY GOODMAN: During your years in South Africa before the end of apartheid, you were a deep advocate of nonviolence, yet you saw so many detained, so many killed. What do you feel, and what did you feel then? How did you make it through those days? What did you advocate? How did you stick to your principles of nonviolence?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: One of the wonderful things actually is — well, I’ve got to speak as a Christian — is belonging to the church and knowing that you belong to this extraordinary body. When things were really rough, it’s wonderful to recall for me now that I sometimes got — when the South African government had taken away my passport, I got passports of love from Sunday school kids here in New York, and I plastered them on the walls of my office. But although I couldn’t travel, hey, here were all of these wonderful people all over the world. And I had a — I met a nun in New York at a particular time, and I asked her, “Can you just tell me a little bit about your life? How do you” — and she said, “Well, I am a solitary. I live in the woods in California. I pray for you. My day starts at 2:00 in the morning.” And I said, “Hey, man! I’ve been prayed for at 2:00 in the morning in the woods in California. What chance does the apartheid government stand?” So, one was being upheld.

And, you know, when frequently you say to people, the victory that we won against apartheid — a spectacular victory — that would not have happened without the support of the international community, without the support of people like yourselves, without the support of those who were students at the time, who might have been crazies, but they were fantastic in their commitment. And in this country, actually, they showed that you could in fact change the moral climate, because, at the time, the Reagan administration was totally opposed to sanctions, and students, but not just students, the many, many people who were prepared to be arrested on our behalf, who demonstrated on our behalf, who boycotted on our behalf, well, they changed the moral climate to such an extent that Congress passed the anti-apartheid legislation, and they even managed a veto override, which was fantastic.

And so, I just happened. I always say I was a leader by default because our real leaders were either in jail or in exile. And sometimes when people say, “And he got the Nobel Peace Prize,” I say, “Well, actually, you know, it was that they thought maybe it was time it was given to a Black,” and, ah, he has an easy surname: Tutu. Tutu. Imagine. Imagine if I had had a surname like Wukaokaule.

AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Tutu, how do you feel — how do you feel about —

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: You can pronounce that!

AMY GOODMAN: How do you feel about the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: It was fantastic seeing the many, many people who came out in opposition. It was fantastic. You know, sometimes when you say, “Ah, Americans,” or, “Oh, people nowadays don’t care,” it’s not true. Millions turned out. Millions. Millions said, “No. Give peace a chance.”

And I said, as so many others — I mean, I wasn’t the only one. The pope said so, too. The archbishop of Canterbury said so. The Dalai Lama said so. But this war, if it was to be a justifiable war in terms of the just war theory, would have to be one that was declared by a legitimate authority. And the administration here was aware of that. That’s why they went to the U.N. There’s no point in going to the U.N. if you had already decided — they probably, of course, had decided, but, I mean, there was no point unless they believed or they realized, I mean, that in order for it to be legitimate, and therefore justifiable, the only authority would have to be the U.N. And when they didn’t get what they wanted from the U.N., they did what they did. We said then, and we keep saying so, not just that it was illegal, it was immoral.

And the consequences of it just now — I mean, you have to be — you’ve really got to be blind to say, “Well, yeah, it’s OK. We removed Saddam Hussein.” Why didn’t you say that was the reason for going? Because the world would have said, “No, no, no, no. That isn’t a reason that will be allowable for you to declare war.”

And I’m sad. I’m sad that we seem so inured now. They tell you a hundred people have been killed, and the United States and its allies are doing that, and they say, “No, no. We targeted that house because our intelligence said so.” Intelligence. The same intelligence that said there were weapons of mass destruction? Please. That’s been done in your name, that mothers and children have been killed. And when you say, “What about the civilian casualties?” they say, “Sorry, our intention was to target insurgents.” And most of us, I think, just shrug our shoulders.

But, you see, you experienced a little bit on September the 11th the kind of thing that is meted out on a regular basis. And they are not — they’re not casualties. Collateral damage. Collateral damage, I tell you. How do you feel if someone says the people who died in the World Trade Center and in Washington, D.C., collateral damage? Say that to someone who lost a wife. Say it to someone who lost a child, someone who lost a friend. Collateral damage. It’s an obscenity. It’s an obscenity.

AMY GOODMAN: The South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died Sunday at the age of 90. I interviewed him at The Culture Project after a play about Guantánamo in 2004. Seventeen years later, Guantánamo remains open, and U.S. troops remain in Iraq. When we come back, we’ll hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Palestine, war, the climate crisis and more. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Woza Moya” by South African jazz musician Herbie Tsoaeli. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue to remember the life and legacy of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He died Sunday. His funeral will be held on New Year’s Day. We turn now to an interview I did with him in November 2008. We spoke at the South African vice consul’s apartment in New York.

AMY GOODMAN: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it’s a pleasure to have you on Democracy Now!

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Thank you very much.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the election of the first African American president, a son of an African man from Kenya?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yippee! No, “yippee” actually — it captures something that is almost ineffable. It’s very close to the kind of feelings we had on April the 27th, 1994. And some, maybe a few people in this country, have said it was, as it were, the Mandela — Mandela moment. It’s a moment when especially people of color have a new spring in their step — they can walk a great deal taller than they used to — and that even though this country, the United States, experiences very considerable racism — I mean, people being dragged to their deaths behind trucks — yet it’s a country that, in fact, has had this extraordinary experience. And it’s something that has filled people with hope that the world can be a better place.

AMY GOODMAN: How did it feel for you? There were so many millions of people who voted for the first time in this election for Barack Obama. How did it feel for you? How old were you when you first voted in South Africa?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Sixty-three.

AMY GOODMAN: Sixty-three years old?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: When was it? What year?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: 1994.

AMY GOODMAN: For the election.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: 1994, that was first time, and the first time for Nelson Mandela, and he, too, this extraordinary human being, and the many, many, many, many others.

Actually, in a way, you would say white people who had always voted in racially discriminated elections were voting for the first time, voting for the first time in a democratic — truly democratic — election. So, we were all, as it were, on the same page.

But it was — I said then, when I was asked, “What is your — how do you describe how you feel?” I said, “Well, how do you describe falling in love? How do you describe red to someone who is totally blind? How do you speak about the glories of a Beethoven symphony to somebody who is deaf? Well, it’s like that. I mean, I’m over the moon. I’m on cloud nine,” as were most of my, if not all of my, compatriots on that day.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is Barack Obama’s greatest challenge as president of the most powerful country on Earth, following eight years of George W. Bush?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes. Very clearly, it has been the fact that for those eight years you’ve had an America that followed a unilateralist line, an America that would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Most of the world had, and America just said, “Go jump in the lake.” Most of the world had ratified the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court, which is where the people who were responsible for September the 11th should have been appearing.

That you are going to have — most people believe that he is going to be welcomed as the leader of the free world who will be more collaborative, who will be more consultative, who will not seem to want to throw the considerable weight of America around and seem to want to be the bully boy.

I have said — I did a piece for The Washington Post, and I said one of the things that would demonstrate a clean break from the previous administration would be closing the abomination Guantánamo Bay. And one would then hope that there would be a much more conciliatory approach to Iran, not, let’s say, the belligerence that has largely characterized the Bush administration. And I would hope, too — and that’s a major challenge — that there will be something to be done to bring a viable peace proposal for the Middle East, to end what I reckon is an unconscionable suffering of the Palestinian people. We should end the firing of Qassam rockets on Israeli citizens.

AMY GOODMAN: You were blocked from going into Gaza in 2006, leading a U.N. delegation there after the killing of a number of Palestinians.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done now with the Middle East specifically, with Israel and the occupation?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: There’s been some very interesting moves with the outgoing prime minister suggesting that Israel has to consider very seriously the proposal of going back to the boundaries of 1967. That’s a very important initiative, if that was taken.

I think that we would have to move very quickly to lifting the embargo. The suffering is unacceptable. It’s totally unacceptable. It doesn’t promote the security of Israel or any other part of that very volatile region. And it is quite contrary to the best teachings of the Jewish faith, you know. And I know, I mean, that there are very, very many in Israel who are opposed to what is happening.

And I pray fervently that there will be a boldness, you know, in saying we’ve got to resolve this, because I think if that — well, no, let’s not say “if,” because a lot hinges on what happens in the Middle East. Let’s say, when that is resolved, what we will find, I mean, that the tensions between, say, the West and the Muslim world, and large part of the Muslim world, I believe, myself, what we will find that that evaporates and that this — this is a saw, chafing, and it’s mucking up too many things. And I pray that this new president will have the capacity to see we’ve got to do something here, for the sake of our own humanity, you know, for the sake of our children.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you compare the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to apartheid South Africa?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I have to speak about what I know. I mean, most people — a Jew will usually speak about their experiences and maybe compare whatever it is that is happening with what happened in the days of the Holocaust. For me, coming from South Africa and going — I mean, and looking at the checkpoints and the arrogance of those young soldiers, probably scared, maybe covering up their apprehension, there’s no way in which I couldn’t say — of course, that is a truth. It reminds me — it reminds me of the kind of experiences that we underwent. I mean, I was bishop of Johannesburg and would be driving from town to Soweto, where we lived, and I would be driving with my wife, and we’d have a roadblock, and the fact of our having to have passes allowing us to move freely in the land of our birth. And now you have that extraordinary structure that — the wall.

And I do not, myself, believe that it has improved security, breaking up families, breaking up — I mean, people who used to be able to walk from their homes to school, children, now have to take a detour that lasts several — I mean, it’s — when you humiliate a people to the extent that they are being — and, yes, one remembers the kind of experience we had when we were being humiliated — when you do that, you are not contributing to your own security. And all you are doing is you are saying to those people, in all of their desperation, “We are still human, and there are things we will not be able to accept — I mean, just sit down. We’ll have to — we have to do something.”

And so you get the suicide bomber. And one does not condone them, but one understands perfectly how people can be driven into a corner, and out of that desperation — and so you have that cycle, the response of Israel to the suicide bomber, which you know is going to provoke another cycle. And one says, “No way, that’s not how God intended to us live,” that it is possible — it’s been shown: It happened in South Africa — it is possible for people who have been enemies to begin to think that they can be friends, at least to coexist.

AMY GOODMAN: The International Criminal Court — should Barack Obama as president sign on to the ICC, sign the treaty for the International Criminal Court?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yes. If you believe in the rule of law, then you are going to say yes. This is one particularly important instrument, because it is an instrument that is saying we will no longer tolerate impunity. The many who are guilty, as is happening just now in the DRC or in Darfur, that people who are guilty of egregious violations have to be brought to book, and it’s got to be done in a way that satisfies those standards that we have. I mean, you don’t hold people in detention without trial. That’s what the world used to say against the South African government. And if it was true that that was wrong, it has to be wrong consistently everywhere.

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Obama supports an end to the War in Iraq but a surge of soldiers in Afghanistan. What are your words of wisdom to him?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Well, I say that obviously it’s to end the war — yeah? — to end the occupation, to — but I’ve also said it would wonderful if, on behalf of the American people, he were to apologize to the Iraqis and to the rest of the world for an invasion that was based on lies.

AMY GOODMAN: The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. I interviewed him at the South African vice consul’s apartment in New York in November 2008, just after the election of Barack Obama. Desmond Tutu died Sunday at the age of 90. We end today’s show with the archbishop speaking to a group of youth climate activists outside the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: I want to say a big thank you to all of you, especially you beautiful young ones. We oldies have made something of a mess of the world. And we want to say to the leaders who are meeting, look in the eyes of your grandchildren.

Climate change is already a serious crisis today. But we can do something about it. If we don’t — if we don’t — hoohoo!, hoho! — there’s no world which we will leave to you, this generation. You won’t have a world. You will be drowning. You will be burning in drought. There will be no food. There will be floods.

We have only one world. We have only one world. If we mess it up, there’s no other world. And for those who think that the rich are going to escape — hahaha! — we either swim or sink together. We have one world. And we want to leave a beautiful world for all of this beautiful, wonderful young generation. We, the oldies, want to leave you a beautiful world. And it is a matter of morality. It is a question of justice.

AMY GOODMAN: The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, speaking to youth climate activists outside the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. He died Sunday at the age of 90. His funeral will be held on Sunday — on New Year’s Day. So, to see all of our interviews, the speeches of Archbishop Tutu, you can go to democracynow.org.

Special thanks to Brendan Allen and Mike Burke. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Mary Conlon. Our general manager is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley, Paul Powell, Mike Di Filippo, Miguel Nogueira, Hugh Gran, Denis Moynihan, David Prude and Dennis McCormick. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe. Wear a mask.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
December 25, 2021

Guantánamo Film Ignores the War on Terror’s Ongoing Tangible Harms

“There is no them, there is only us,” says filmmaker Alex Gibney reflecting on the story of Abu Zubaydah, a torture victim and Guantánamo prisoner who is the focus of his HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner. Expanding on this, he poses a challenge: “If we believe in that idea, how can we imprison a man without charge for the remainder of his life — not for what he did to us, but for what we did to him?” In this statement made at the conclusion of the documentary, Gibney explicitly notes that the empirical measure of which values the United States truly upholds is its own behavior, alone — without justifications rooted in the concept of a real or imagined “them.” This truth is powerfully evident when we look at the U.S.’s use of torture. However, The Forever Prisoner deeply buries this powerful and necessary point. The film, ostensibly focused on Zubaydah, ultimately seems to use him as a narrative tool, while ignoring the ongoing brutal harms against him and all victims of the “war on terror.”

Who’s Eating the Popcorn?

As a longtime researcher, writer and organizer focused on closing Guantánamo Bay and ending torture, I was anticipating a film that would provide new insight and perspectives on Zubaydah’s case in the context of the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror. While The Forever Prisoner did reveal some new and lesser-known details surrounding the case, nothing in it fundamentally altered the known contours of Zubaydah’s story. Similarly, the film’s details offered no truly new perspectives on the “enhanced interrogation program,” in premise or implementation, nor the underlying fact that there has not been (nor is there ever likely to be, without a truly dramatic shift) genuine accountability for its abuses.

Zubaydah himself is absent from the film — as the title suggests, he remains in custody and incommunicado — and little new information is provided about his case. Instead, the film’s main emphasis is Gibney’s reflection on how the United States could have engaged in this conduct, a reflection that has been aired many times over the years. Even before the war on terror and its particular abuses, the United States has consistently retreated to empty assertions of its unique values in order to whitewash state violence, and documentary explorations of the tension between how the U.S. sees itself and its actual actions abound. Instead of exceptionalizing Zubaydah’s case in order to retread this well-worn path, Gibney might have done better exploring the trajectory of the violence Zubaydah and other war on terror prisoners have experienced in the context of how, if it is even possible, to chart a way forward. Instead, he remains fixated on who the U.S. is, its identity and values, rather than reckoning with what it does, the costs of its actions and the possibility of a different future. For viewers like me, this documentary offered little hope of that possibility.

In fact, it is unclear who constitutes Gibney’s intended audience. For those with a prior interest in and engagement with these issues, the information it provides will be mostly basic and familiar; for the uninitiated, it will be chock-full of complex and confusing details. More fundamentally, given the public’s highly polarized opinions about the U.S.’s conduct in the war on terror and detention and torture, this documentary faced a high bar if it aims to disrupt existing perceptions held by militaristic conservatives. Unfortunately, nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels urgent enough to pose a real challenge to the viewer’s existing moral compass, even in the unlikely event that those who firmly believe the U.S. is justified in taking any extreme measures in fighting terrorism, end up somehow watching it.

If You Don’t Shine by Merit, Shine by Comparison: Abu Zubaydah’s Story

Abu Zubaydah was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002. At the time, the U.S. claimed he was the number three person in al-Qaeda, but the government has since acknowledged that he was not in fact part of the organization at all, but instead operated independently. After his capture, Zubaydah was flown to a series of CIA “black sites” around the world and subjected to a systematic program of brutal torture, which would come to be euphemized as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The documentary focuses on the time Zubaydah spent at the site where he was initially taken into CIA custody, in Thailand.

The beginning of the documentary is structured around interagency tensions as the FBI and the CIA wrangled over who would conduct the interrogation of Zubaydah and the parameters of allowable techniques. Much of the testimony offered comes from former FBI agent Ali Soufan, whose experience interrogating Zubaydah is presented as a humane contrast to the CIA’s tactics and the recommendations of two privately contracted psychologists. By giving Soufan such a large platform, the film contributes to the bizarre construction of the FBI as the moral force in the war on terror, but this is far from the only pitfall.

While the documentary centers the wonky details of FBI-CIA power struggles, the specific abuses that Zubaydah endured — which included being chained to a chair naked, subjected to loud music, denied clothing while in his freezing old cell, long periods of sleep deprivation followed by long interrogations, and confinement within a small enclosed box — form a visual backdrop. Because Zubaydah cannot speak for himself, we hear from him via excerpts from his journal and drawings he has done documenting his suffering. While the visuals are striking, the film rarely pauses to allow the viewer to absorb the sheer inhumanity of the torture Zubaydah endured. Instead, these visuals often seem to be used merely to highlight points of conflict between the various government actors who appear in person. In this way, his suffering is reduced to a narrative tool, his physical being more an exhibit than a human body.

The film contributes to the bizarre construction of the FBI as the moral force in the war on terror.

Despite the title, The Forever Prisoner, the film rarely calls attention to Zubaydah’s continuing plight, focusing heavily on his first few years in U.S. custody and not on the horrible limbo of indefinite detention in which he remains. This, too, seems to be a symptom of Gibney’s centering of the intelligence community and its internal conflicts. The bigger question of just how deeply the U.S. could dehumanize and brutalize the “other,” including through the use of Zubaydah’s torture as a blueprint for the abuse of other war on terror prisoners, plays a much smaller role in a film that views these issues primarily through the lens of legality, politics, and, ultimately what all of this says about “American values.” Gibney appears to be exploring Zubaydah’s story as a way of workshopping the conceptual discrepancy between U.S. conduct and U.S. values — specifically in service of restoring the identity claimed by the U.S.

In contrasting the early behavior of FBI interrogators with the CIA-promoted tactics that were eventually adopted, Gibney returns often to the question of whether the enhanced interrogation techniques actually yielded valuable intelligence. The answer, of course, is that torture rarely results in anything other than the victim saying whatever the interrogator wants them to say. It is striking, however, that in all of the discussion about the relative worth of the intelligence gathered versus the human cost, the film glosses almost completely over the fact this particular “high-value detainee” was not remotely a top-connected terrorist mastermind. Somewhat shockingly, the fact that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all, much less in the top three of its leadership, is not even mentioned until minute 1:26 of the two-hour film.

Zubaydah’s story is not about unequal justice, but the absence of justice altogether.

White Tears Mitchell

Another major voice in the documentary is CIA-contracted psychologist James Mitchell, who is largely considered the primary scapegoat offered by the government in the fallout when the torture program became public knowledge. The portrait offered of Mitchell, while not especially sympathetic, is that of a fully fleshed-out human being, who tears up at one point when reflecting on how his work has been used to systematize and normalize torture — which from his perspective is treatment that is far worse than the tactics he designed. Here again, the viewer is struck by the dissonance between the absent or essentialized Zubaydah, and the platform provided for someone who played such an instrumental role in his torture, and, despite the tears, fails to demonstrate true remorse. Not only is he unapologetic, he also outright refuses to call the tactics utilized in enhanced interrogation program “torture,” after more than a decade and an entire report from the Senate Intelligence Committee on CIA torture in 2014. This reflects a fundamental way in which The Forever Prisoner falls short — the lack of genuine compassion directed toward Zubaydah, and the complete erasure of the way in which his ordeal set the framework for the torture of countless Muslims stands in stark contrast to the nuanced exploration of the interactions between and feelings of government actors.

At the end of the film, Gibney reflects, “Twenty years after 9/11, I’m stirred to remember the innocents that died on that day. But I’m also stirred to remember the purpose of that vicious attack. It wasn’t to win a war. It was to provoke us to abandon the principles of democracy we claim to live by. The Forever Prisoner is a living reminder of one of the ideals we abandoned: equal justice under the law.” This statement circles back to Gibney’s central goal — using Abu Zubaydah’s story to illustrate the disparity between the U.S.’s purported values and its lived ones. After everything we have seen about Zubaydah’s torture, however, equal justice under the law hardly seems to be an appropriate starting point for analysis. Differential treatment under the law is an entirely different category — Zubaydah’s story is not about unequal justice, but the absence of justice altogether. What happened to Zubaydah is what happens when the naive belief that the U.S. operates with any integrity persists in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

As Zubaydah continues to be detained at Guantánamo with no progress whatsoever toward the resolution of his case, the shortcomings of the documentary The Forever Prisoner stand as a reminder that justice delayed is justice denied. After 20 years of the war on terror, there is little reason to believe that the U.S. can be redeemed, but honestly acknowledging harm should be a goal worth pursuing in and of itself. Unfortunately, Gibney’s film falls far short of this goal, by ignoring the tangible harms of the war on terror in favor of repairing the identity of the state.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
November 5, 2021

A Torture Survivor Speaks At The Guantanamo Military Commissions

I traveled to the Guantanamo Bay prison late last week to watch the long-awaited military commission sentencing hearing in United States v. Khan. What unfolded over those two days was extraordinary. There were historic moments; all-too-familiar, but no less outrageous, prosecutorial transgressions; and a military commission judge who reached his wits end with the government. From a broader policy perspective, the hearing affirmed that plea agreements are the only realistic path to resolving the cases of charged men, and so an essential tool in any meaningful effort to close Guantanamo.

The post A Torture Survivor Speaks At The Guantanamo Military Commissions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
November 3, 2021

A US Military Jury Is Seeking Clemency for a Guantánamo Detainee

Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of torture and sexual assault.

With all of the hoopla this past week over the off-year elections, President Biden’s foreign trip, and the ongoing drama on Capitol Hill, there was very little discussion of the latest chapter in one of the most important and horrific stories of our time.

The New York Times reported on an unprecedented sentencing hearing of a detainee held at Guantánamo Bay. It was the first time a prisoner detailed in public the torture he underwent at the hands of the U.S. government. There are no adequate words to describe the grotesque war crimes committed against this man. Times’ reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered the Guantánamo legal proceedings for many years now, vividly detailed the story of 41-year-old Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from a Baltimore high school and, as a lost young man, took a trip back to his home country in 2002 after his mother died. There he was seduced into joining a terrorist organization. As he put it, “I went willingly to Al Qaeda. I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”

Khan was captured by American forces in 2003 and has been held in legal limbo ever since, despite the fact that he cooperated from the beginning. But according to his testimony, the more he cooperated, the more he was tortured. As with so many other victims of the brutal U.S. torture regime, Khan was compelled to make up tales in order to get the torture to stop. When his tales didn’t pan out, he was tortured some more.

The maze of national security restrictions put on Guantánamo prisoners attempting to defend themselves (an almost 20-year long process) has generally made it impossible for them to speak out about what happened to them. But apparently, (it isn’t clear from the reporting) Khan’s lawyers found a way for him to publicly detail the torture he endured without specifically accusing any individuals. So last week, in open court, he took the stand and expressed remorse for his actions and forgave his tormentors. In front of his horrified father and sister, both of whom are American citizens, he laid out for the record what happened to him.

Kahn described in detail the primitive conditions in which he was held: naked, with his hands chained above his head or shackled to the wall crouching “like a dog,” beaten and sleep-deprived to the point of hallucination. He was waterboarded repeatedly and nearly drowned. And then there was the sexual and “medical” sadism, as Rosenberg reports:

[A]fter he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a purée of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.

The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses.”

“They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water,” he said, adding that he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.

He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.

When CIA officers transferred Khan from one black site to another, they would insert an enema and then duct tape a diaper on him so he wouldn’t have to be taken to the bathroom.

Kahn was eventually charged with four terrorism charges and pled guilty to delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003 that was traced to the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time of the bombing, Kahn was already in custody. He also worked with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in some failed plots during his brief period with al Qaeda.

At his trial, the lead prosecutor conceded that Kahn got “extremely rough” treatment but told the jury he was lucky to be alive when the victims of al Qaeda are not. Kahn’s lawyer said “Majid was raped at the hands of the U.S. government. He told them everything from the beginning.”

The jury of eight military officers was required to hand down a sentence of 25 to 40 years. They gave him 26 years beginning from his guilty plea in 2012. But in an unexpected twist, obviously moved by the testimony, seven of the eight jurors wrote a letter to the overseer of military commissions asking him to grant Kahn clemency. They did not know of a secret deal that was struck earlier this year with the Pentagon in which the sentence could actually end early next year and no later than February 2025 because Khan turned government cooperator upon pleading guilty.

Some of the details of these monstrous tactics were known already due to the “executive summary” of the classified Senate Torture Report that the Obama administration ensured would be withheld from the public. You may recall that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA were at each other’s throats over that project with the CIA issuing criminal referrals against Senate staffers and the committee accusing the CIA of penetrating its computers. (As it turned out, the Inspector General found that the CIA was wrong on both of those issues and then CIA Director, John Brennan, was forced to apologize.) The Senate passed the McCain-Feinstein Anti-Torture Amendment, banning “enhanced interrogation techniques” the Bush administration’s Soviet-style euphemism for torture. But no one has ever been held accountable.

In 2018, Gina Haspel, who was involved in the CIA’s infamous destruction of CIA tapes that documented the practice and was personally involved in the torture of one terrorist suspect, became the head of the CIA under Donald Trump, the man who won the presidency in 2016 by declaring:

Would I approve waterboarding? You bet your ass I would — in a heartbeat, And I would approve more than that. Don’t kid yourself, folks. It works, okay? It works. Only a stupid person would say it doesn’t work.

Torture doesn’t work. And the use of it, as well as the cover-up by two administrations and the crude endorsement by a man who would be president, is one of the greatest moral stains on America’s reputation in its long history of moral stains. And this one happened on our watch.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 9, 2021

Biden Tells Supreme Court That Publicly Documented Torture Is a State Secret

When Abu Zubaydah was apprehended in Pakistan in 2002, the George W. Bush administration falsely characterized him as chief of operations for al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s number three man. For the next four years, the CIA sent Zubaydah to its “black sites” in Thailand and Poland where he was viciously tortured. In 2006, Zubaydah was taken to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. He has never been charged with a crime.

The torture of Abu Zubaydah is thoroughly documented in the 2014 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In fact, several of the justices at the October 6 Supreme Court oral argument in United States v. Zubaydah referred to his treatment as “torture.”

Zubaydah’s lawyers detailed the torture he suffered in their brief (which referenced the Senate torture report) as follows:

On 83 different occasions in a single month of 2002, he was strapped to an inclined board with his head lower than his feet while CIA contractors poured water up his nose and down his throat, bringing him within sight of death. He was handcuffed and repeatedly slammed into walls, and suspended naked from hooks in the ceiling for hours at a time. He was forced to remain awake for eleven consecutive days, and doused again and again with cold water when he collapsed into sleep. He was forced into a tall, narrow box the size of a coffin, and crammed into another box that would nearly fit under a chair, where he was left for hours. He was subjected to a particularly grotesque humiliation described by the CIA as “rectal rehydration.”

Nevertheless, the Biden administration told the high court that Zubaydah’s well-known torture is a “state secret” because former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said publicizing it would harm national security. Thus, Solicitor General Brian Fletcher argued, the two contractors who orchestrated Zubaydah’s torture in Poland should not be permitted to testify in a Polish court’s criminal investigation into the treatment of Zubaydah.

But as Justice Elena Kagan said, “At a certain point, it becomes a little farcical, this idea of the assertion of a privilege, doesn’t it? I mean, if everybody knows what you’re asserting privilege on, like, what exactly does this privilege.… It’s not a state secrets privilege anymore.”

“Ultimately, the question in this case is whether torture can be kept secret. In a democracy, the answer to that question has to be no,” attorney Joseph Margulies, who represents Zubaydah, told Truthout. “The state secrets doctrine must never be used to prevent an accounting for torture done in our name. If ‘state secrets’ means ‘protect torture,’ before long we won’t have a state to protect.”

Biden Asks Court to Prevent Testimony of Psychologists Who Tortured Zubaydah in Poland

The Biden administration seeks to prevent testimony of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who have already testified in a prior case and in the military commission at Guantánamo. Mitchell and Jessen were the chief architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the U.S. government’s euphemism for torture. They were paid more than $80 million for their vile work.

Continuing Donald Trump’s attempts to thwart the psychologists’ testimony, the Biden administration claims that if Mitchell and Jessen admit Zubaydah was tortured at a CIA black site in Poland, it will create a “breach of trust” with the Polish government.

“The Polish prosecutor already has information [that it happened in Poland] and doesn’t need U.S. discovery on the topic,” David Klein, Zubaydah’s attorney, told the justices. “What he does need to know is what happened inside Abu Zubaydah’s cell between December 2002 and September 2003. So I want to ask simple questions like, how was Abu Zubaydah fed? What was his medical condition? What was his cell like? And, yes, was he tortured?”

Zubaydah’s Testimony Would Be an “Off Ramp” From the Litigation, Gorsuch Says

After the Supreme Court engaged in an extensive back-and-forth exchange about the parameters of the state secrets privilege, Justices Stephen Breyer, Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor all insisted that Zubaydah himself, who was an eyewitness to his torture, should be allowed to testify instead of the psychologists at the Polish proceeding. That would circumvent the state secrets issue, they noted. Gorsuch called it an “off ramp” to avoid additional litigation.

“… the question in this case is whether torture can be kept secret. In a democracy, the answer to that question has to be no.”

Solicitor General Fletcher responded, “Abu Zubaydah cannot testify because he is being held incommunicado. He has been held in Guantánamo incommunicado.”

“Why, Why?” Breyer asked, astounded that Zubaydah is still being held in Guantánamo after 15 years. “In Hamdi [v. Rumsfeld], we said you could hold people in Guantánamo. The words were: Active combat operations against Taliban fighters apparently are going on in Afghanistan. Well, they’re not anymore.”

Brett Kavanaugh asked Fletcher, “Is the United States still engaged in hostilities for purposes of the AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force] against Al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations?” Fletcher replied, “That is the government’s position, that notwithstanding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, we continue to be engaged in hostilities with Al Qaeda and, therefore, the detention under law of war remains proper.”

Kavanaugh and Fletcher apparently overlooked the fact that “the C.I.A. later concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda,” according to the Senate torture report. And the AUMF that Congress gave Bush after 9/11 only authorized the president to use military force against those groups and individuals responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Four U.S. Presidents Used State Secrets Privilege in “War on Terror”

Joe Biden is not the first president to invoke the state secrets privilege in the war on terror. The Bush administration used the privilege to evade accountability for torture, to silence whistleblowers and prevent disclosure of its extraordinary rendition program (where the CIA sent people including Zubaydah to other countries to be tortured). Bush’s assertion of the privilege did not, however, succeed in keeping the publicly acknowledged National Security Agency surveillance program secret. The Obama administration invoked the privilege to block judicial inquiry into extraordinary rendition. It also used the privilege to hide Barack Obama’s “kill list” that authorized the CIA and the Defense Department to kill civilians with no showing of imminent threat. And the Trump administration utilized the privilege in Zubaydah’s case and another torture case, as well as to preclude release of an FBI report about Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks.

Will the Supreme Court accept Biden’s assertion of the state secrets privilege to prevent testimony of Mitchell and Jessen in the Polish court? Will the Court suggest that the executive branch reconsider the indefinite detention of Zubaydah in light of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan? Will the Court urge the executive to allow Zubaydah to testify about his torture at the CIA’s black site in Poland? We will know by June 2022.

This case is a pivotal test of the willingness of the Supreme Court to check and balance the executive when it perpetrates torture and other war crimes in its war on terror. In 2016, Margulies said that Abu Zubaydah is “the poster child for the torture program, and that’s why they never want him to be heard from again.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
October 1, 2021

Fight to Close Guantánamo Urgent as Biden Plans New Migrant Jail at Base

We look at the life and legacy of the late Michael Ratner, the trailblazing human rights lawyer and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, with three people who knew him well: Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights; Vince Warren, the organization’s executive director; and Lizzy Ratner, Ratner’s niece and a senior editor at The Nation magazine. Michael Ratner spent decades opposing government abuse and fought to close the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, first in the 1990s when it was used to hold thousands of Haitian asylum seekers and later when the George W. Bush administration opened a military prison there to detain hundreds of people from the so-called war on terror. Ratner died in 2016 at age 72. His posthumous memoir, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer, has just been published.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

It’s been nearly 20 years since George W. Bush opened the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo, where 779 men in total have been held, overwhelmingly without ever being charged. They were tortured, held in isolation, stripped of their rights. President Biden is the fourth president to oversee Guantánamo, which is based at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. Today, 39 men remain, including at least 10 who have already been cleared for release but remain locked up.

The military prison is only one part of the history of Guantánamo. In the early 1990s, the U.S. held over 12,000 Haitian asylum seekers at Guantánamo. On part of the base, the U.S. set up the world’s first detention camp for refugees with HIV. Now the Biden administration is considering once again holding Haitians at Guantánamo. NBC recently reported that the Biden administration is advertising for a new contract to operate a migrant detention facility at Guantánamo with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole.

Today we look at the life and legacy of Michael Ratner, a trailblazing lawyer who worked to shut down the Guantánamo HIV camp in the 1990s, where Haitians were held, then later led the fight to win habeas corpus rights for Muslim prisoners held at Guantánamo after the September 11th attacks. He was also a lifelong critic of war and U.S. imperialism.

Michael Ratner died five years ago, but his influence on the legal community can still be felt. OR Books recently published Michael’s posthumous memoir, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer. It details his involvement in decades of legal battles while working at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by three guests who knew Michael well, but first let’s turn to Michael Ratner in his own words. Here he’s speaking in 2007, when he was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.

MICHAEL RATNER: Today we’re in the midst of a pitched battle, a pitched battle to put this country back, at least ostensibly, on the page of fundamental rights and moral decency. The battle is difficult, and the road is long and hard. On occasion, I get pessimistic. Sometimes I and my colleagues feel like Sisyphus. Twice — not just once, twice — we pushed the rock up the hill and won rights for Guantánamo detainees in the Supreme Court, and twice the rock was rolled back down by Congress over those rights. So we pushed it back up again. Five days ago, we were in the Supreme Court for the third time. It was difficult, more difficult than before, because the justices have changed. Four are antediluvians, lost forever to humanity.

But before I get us all depressed, we’ve had our victories. We’ve gotten lawyers to Guantánamo, stopped the most overt torture and freed half of the Guantánamo detainees — over 300. We have gotten Maher Arar out of Syria. Canada has apologized for his torture, given him a substantial recovery — in Canadian dollars, which is no embarrassment anymore. They said he was an innocent man, but he remains on the U.S. terror list. We have slowed, but not yet stopped, a remarkable grab for authoritarian power.

I also don’t look hope — I also don’t lose hope, because I think about the early days of Guantánamo. At first, we were few. But now we are many. At first, when CCR began, we were the lonely warriors taking on the Bush administration at Guantánamo. Now we are many. Now we, just on Guantánamo alone, are over 600 lawyers, most from major firms of every political stripe. These lawyers have an understanding of what is at stake: liberty itself. This struggle — this struggle will be seen as one of the great chapters in the legal and political history of the United States.

Today, war, torture, disappearances, murder surround us like plagues. Most in this country go on their way oblivious. Some don’t want to know and are like ostriches. Some want to justify it all. Some want to make compromises. But be warned: We are at a tipping point, a tipping point into lawlessness and medievalism. We have our work to do. For each of us, the time for talking is long, long over. This is no time for compromise, no time for political calculation. As Howard Zinn admonishes us, it is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners. The Puffin/Nation Prize reminds us all that the job for each of us is not to be on the side of the executioners. Thank you all.

AMY GOODMAN: The pioneering radical attorney Michael Ratner, speaking in 2007, when he was awarded the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship for his work heading up the Center for Constitutional Rights. Michael Ratner died in 2016, but his memoir, Moving the Bar: My Life as a Radical Lawyer, has just been published by OR Books.

We’re joined right now by three guests who knew Michael well. Vince Warren is the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Lizzy Ratner is the niece of the late Michael Ratner and a senior editor at The Nation magazine. And Baher Azmy is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Baher, I wanted to begin with you. If you can talk about Guantánamo? Because this week, we’ve got a federal court hearing the case of Guantánamo. You write, Michael “Ratner knew from a lifetime fighting U.S. militarism, racism, and torture that Guantanamo, if unchecked, would become a centerpiece of American authoritarianism, where lawlessness and violence would redound across American democratic institutions. At the time, Guantanamo was the crown jewel of the Bush administration’s war on terror.” Since then, there has been President Obama, there’s been President Trump and now President Biden. But Guantánamo remains open, from 779 prisoners to, at this point, 39 prisoners. But it remains open. Can you talk about both Guantánamo and Michael Ratner’s legacy in trying to get it shut down?

BAHER AZMY: Thank you, Amy. It’s stirring to hear Michael’s words so clearly.

I think he saw, from the very beginning, what everyone else perceived possibly as a necessary compromise. But what he saw is the possibility of creating a prison outside the law that was a marker of lawlessness, and therefore authoritarianism, that would single out, in this case, the most recent enemy — Muslims — not unlike what he saw 10 years before with the demonization and exclusion of Black Haitian refugees. And what he saw is the connection between militarism and war, and domestic forms of authoritarianism and repression.

And that was a key to his intervention in Guantánamo, because bad things happen in dark places, not only bad things to the human beings locked up there, whose families are clamoring for understanding about what happened to them, but bad things happen to our institutions, our democratic institutions, through the arrogation of massive executive power, the dismissal of oversight by courts and the public. And so, that intervention was critical to open up Guantánamo and expose the lies, torture and incompetence that undergirded that project.

And I think — excuse me — one thing he also saw, and that we all recognize now, is the continuity of Guantánamo in the American imperial project. Of course, it was taken in 1908 as part of an imperial project in the Spanish-American War and kept as a military base to undertake military-style missions. And initially we talked about Guantánamo as exceptional, but, as you note, it’s here 20 years later. And I think given the way in which we’ve solidified borders, militarized domestic police forces, and all sorts of entailments from the post-9/11 world, Guantánamo isn’t particularly exceptional. Fighting against it is critical. But fighting against it, recognizing it’s at the sort of core of American forms of repression, is a key understanding that I think he knew well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Lizzy Ratner into the conversation, editor at The Nation magazine, the niece of Michael Ratner. Let’s talk about this latest — there’s this possibility, at least, NBC is reporting, of putting Haitians, refugees, asylum seekers, once again in Guantánamo. And let’s be clear, this is, originally, Guantánamo, the idea of putting them outside the reach of U.S. law. But if you can talk about back in the 1990s, when Haitian refugees fleeing a coup in Haiti are then put by Bush at Guantánamo, up to 12,000 people, and Michael’s role in trying to shut that down?

LIZZY RATNER: Well, first, Amy, thank you so much for having me on. And thank you for having all of us on to talk about Michael. It is always wonderful to talk about him, his work and his legacy.

And the history of Guantánamo and the Haitian history of Guantánamo is crucially important to understanding what we’re seeing now both still with the sort of detention of detainees there, of Muslim detainees from the so-called war on terror, and then also what we’re seeing now with Haitian refugees being sent back to Haiti. So, it’s a crucial moment to understand.

As you pointed out, in 1991, there was a U.S.-backed coup — that’s important to say — when the leftist leader of Haiti was kicked out of the country. And there was horrible, horrible, horrible oppression in Haiti. So, many Haitians, who were working people, average, everyday people, people of the left, fled in desperation. They were being attacked. And the United States, which had for years backed dictators in Haiti, said, “We don’t want Haitians coming here. We don’t want to take these refugees of the coup that we backed. So we’re going to prevent them from arriving in the United States.”

And this is sort of a key part of the law to understand. If someone arrives in the United States, they have a right to make an asylum claim. And the United States has to keep them here while they entertain that claim. So, how do you prevent people from making legitimate asylum claims? You prevent them from coming to the United States.

And so, what the United States did at the time, under Bush initially and then under Clinton, was that they rounded up Haitians, who were coming to the United States on small boats on the high seas — they had the Coast Guard pick them up — and they took them to Guantánamo. And they said, “This isn’t really the United States, so you don’t have actual rights here.” And then they processed people on Guantánamo to determine whether or not they had a credible fear of persecution, which is the standard for asylum in the United States. Anyone they found not to have a credible fear — and there’s probably a lot of debate about how well they made those judgments — but anybody who did not have a credible fear, they sent back to Haiti.

But they warehoused many people on Guantánamo while they were trying to determine if they had a credible fear. And — this is crucial — they forcibly tested people who had a credible fear, who could have made legitimate asylum claims — they forcibly tested them for HIV. And when they found that several people had HIV, they refused to let them into the United States, despite the fact that people would have had credible claims to asylum, they could have gotten asylum here, they could have begun an asylum case. And that’s because there’s horrible bigotry and racism against Haitians and against people with HIV and AIDS. And so, rather than bringing people to the United States, they kept them on [Guantánamo], because, they said, “Well, at least we’re not sending them back to Haiti.” So they kept Haitians on this — you know, in this prison camp, the world’s first HIV detention center, prison camp — a plague colony. We created it in the United States. And they kept several hundred Haitians there for well over a year.

And Michael, with the lawyer Harold Koh at Yale Law School and a whole bunch of law students at Yale, said, “This is outrageous. The United States is sort of trying to play footsie with the law. It’s saying that people on Guantánamo — that Guantánamo isn’t part of the United States, and therefore the U.S. law doesn’t extend to Guantánamo, the protections of U.S. law don’t exist there.” And so, he was fighting at the most basic level to get people out of horrible, horrible conditions, and then also to say that the United States couldn’t create this kind of sinkhole in which it could do whatever it wants, dispense with the law and just kind of, you know, play all kinds of illegal games.

And so, I think that moment is really crucial to understanding two things — and then I’ll stop talking. But I think it’s crucial to understanding both the later work that Michael and the CCR did on Guantánamo with regard to detainees in the so-called war on terror, and it’s really crucial to understanding what’s happening now with Title 42. The United States is once again seeing people from Haiti who could make asylum claims, and they’re saying, “Uh-uh-uh, we don’t want you to come in. We want to circumvent this whole process, and we’re going to just send you back, or possibly send you to Guantánamo.”

AMY GOODMAN: Vince Warren, if you can talk more about this and this trajectory from the early ’90s to what we’re seeing today? You started as an Ella Baker fellow at Center for Constitutional Rights. You’re now the executive director of CCR and worked with Michael for decades.

VINCENT WARREN: Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Amy, and it’s wonderful to be on with Baher and Lizzy.

And, you know, picking up on what Lizzy was talking about, Michael — people might misperceive what Michael is about by just focusing on the specter of Guantánamo. So, yes, Michael did decades of work on that particular institution and in that legal — the context of preventing the legal black hole. But people should remember that Guantánamo has become iconic, largely — as a negative icon, largely because of Michael’s work. But what it actually really represents is, number one, that we now have seven presidents, since that time — six or seven presidents, that have used Guantánamo as an offshore prison, where they claim that the law doesn’t apply, to dump all of the people that are causing problems in terms of how they are working the question of border security or national security.

And so, what Michael was able to do, even back in the ’90s, when a lot of folks were like, “Well, I don’t see what the big deal is,” A, or, B, “I see what the big deal is, but how the heck would you challenge that legally? Doesn’t the government have a right to keep us safe from people that have HIV by putting them in Guantánamo?” Michael saw that conceding the legality of a blackhole structure in the United States would turn into something like Guantánamo, that there would be other people that would be put there. In fact, you know, I think history has shown, if you look at some of the FBI documents that are emerging now, that folks on the left, radicals, people that want a greater society, folks like myself, there were plans to put us and people like us in these types of camps. So Michael was really pushing the framework that if we allow the government to create a law-free zone, it will create a legality around clearly illegal activity.

The other thing that I would want to point out, just to draw it together, is the Haitian HIV situation, the Guantánamo detainees after 9/11 and the proposal to situate refugees and migrants in Guantánamo today by the Biden administration all share a mythology. And the mythology is one of a great and consuming irrational fear on the part of the United States citizenry about feeling safe.

So, in the 1990s, HIV was the thing that made people lose their minds in terms of fear, even though they didn’t understand the disease. I mean, when you read the court papers, you know, Michael and Harold had to explain to the government and to the court that you couldn’t catch HIV by talking to people. Yet and still, there was hysteria around the question of HIV and what it was going to do.

In the context of 9/11, the hysteria was around terrorism. Every Brown, Black, Muslim, South Asian, Arab person, none of those people but with a turban, represented an irrational fear in the United States, and we wanted to keep those people out in any way possible.

And now, with respect to what’s happening at the southern border and, you know, in terms of our work at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ALCU’s work around asylum seeking, in the Trump administration, the irrational fear was overrunning the border. In the Biden administration, the irrational fear is COVID.

So, in each one of these contexts, it’s fueled by — although not really in response to, it’s fueled by an overarching hysteria that we have in the United States that makes people want to side with incarceration and dehumanization in order to keep themselves feeling safe.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
September 10, 2021

Guantanamo Past the Point of All Shame

https://worldbeyondwar.org/guantanamo-past-the-point-of-all-shame/

U.S. high schools should teach courses on Guantanamo: what not to do in the world, how not to make it even worse, and how not to compound that catastrophe beyond all shame and recovery.

As we tear down Confederate statues and continue brutalizing victims in Guantanamo, I wonder if in 2181, had Hollywood still been around, it would have made movies from the perspective of Guantanamo’s prisoners while the U.S. government committed new and different atrocities to be bravely confronted in 2341.

That is to say, when will people learn that the problem is cruelty, not the particular flavor of cruelty?

The purpose of the Guantanamo prisons was and is cruelty and sadism. Names like Geoffrey Miller and Michael Bumgarner should become permanent synonyms for the twisted dehumanizing of victims in cages. The war is supposedly over, making it difficult for aging men who were innocent boys to “return” to the “battlefield” if freed from the Hell on Earth stolen from Cuba, but nothing ever made sense. We’re on President #3 since promises were first made to shut Guantanamo down, yet it moans and rattles on, brutalizing its victims and their captors.

Don’t Forget Us Here is the title of Mansoor Adayfi’s book about his life from age 19 to age 33, which he spent in Guantanamo. He could not be seen as the youngster he was when first kidnapped and tortured, and was seen instead — or at least the pretense was made — that he was an important top anti-U.S. terrorist. That didn’t require seeing him as a human being, quite the opposite. Nor did it have to make any sense. There was never any evidence that Adayfi was the person he was accused of being. Some of his imprisoners told him they knew it was false. He was never charged with any crime. But at some point the U.S. government decided to pretend he was a different top terrorism commander, despite the lack of any evidence for that one either, or any explanation of how they could have captured such a person accidentally while imagining that he was someone else.

Adayfi’s account begins like so many others. He was abused by the CIA in Afghanistan first: hung from a ceiling in the dark, naked, beaten, electrocuted. Then he was stuck into a cage in Guantanamo, having no idea what part of the Earth he was in or why. He only knew the guards behaved like lunatics, freaking out and screaming in a language he couldn’t speak. The other prisoners spoke a variety of languages and had no reason to trust each other. The better guards were awful, and the Red Cross was worse. There seemed to be no rights, except for the iguanas.

At any opportunity, guards stormed in and beat prisoners, or dragged them off for torture/interrogation or solitary confinement. They deprived them of food, water, healthcare, or shelter from the sun. They stripped them and “cavity-searched” them. They mocked them and their religion.

But Adayfi’s account develops into one of fighting back, of organizing and rallying the prisoners into all variety of resistance, violent and otherwise. Some hint of this appears early on in his atypical reaction to the usual threat to bring his mother there and rape her. Adayfi laughed at that threat, confident that his mother could whip the guards into shape.

One of the main tools available and used was the hunger strike. Adayfi was force-fed for years. Other tactics included refusing to come out of a cage, refusing to answer endless ridiculous questions, destroying everything in a cage, inventing outrageous confessions of terrorist activity for days of interrogations and then pointing out that it was all made-up nonsense, making noise, and splashing guards with water, urine, or feces.

The people running the place chose to treat the prisoners as subhuman beasts, and did a pretty good job of making the prisoners play the part. The guards and interrogators would believe almost anything: that the prisoners had secret weapons or a radio network or had each been a top ally of Osama bin Laden — anything other than that they were innocent. The relentless interrogation — the slaps, the kicks, the broken ribs and teeth, the freezing, the stress positions, the noise machines, the lights — would go on until you admitted being whoever they said you were, but then you’d be in for it bad if you didn’t know lots of details about this unknown person.

We know that some of the guards really thought all the prisoners were crazed murderers, because sometimes they’d play a trick on a new guard who fell asleep and put a prisoner near him when he awoke. The result was sheer panic. But we also know it was a choice to view a 19-year-old as a top general. It was a choice to suppose that after years and years of “Where is Bin Laden?” any answer that actually existed would still be relevant. It was a choice to use violence. We know it was a choice to use violence because of an extensive multi-year experiment in three acts.

In Act I, the prison treated its victims as monsters, torturing, strip-searching, routinely beating, depriving of food, etc., even while trying to bribe prisoners to spy on each other. And the result was often-violent resistance. One means that sometimes worked for Adayfi to lessen some injury was to beg for it like Brer Rabbit. Only by professing his deep desire to be kept near screaming loud vacuum cleaners put there, not to clean, but to make so much noise around the clock that one couldn’t talk or think, did he get a break away from them.

The prisoners organized and plotted. They raised hell until interrogators stopped torturing one of their number. They jointly lured General Miller into position before hitting him in the face with shit and urine. They smashed their cages, ripped out the toilets, and showed how they could escape throught the hole in the floor. They went on mass hunger srike. They gave the U.S. military vastly more work — but then, is that something the military didn’t want?

Adayfi went six years without communication with his family. He became such an enemy of his torturers that he wrote a statement praising the crimes of 9/11 and promising to fight the U.S. if he got out.

In Act 2, after Barack Obama became president promising to close Guantanamo but didn’t close it, Adayfi was permitted a lawyer. The lawyer treated him as a human being — but only after being horrified to meet him and not believing he was meeting the right person; Adayfi did not match his description as the very worst of the worst.

And the prison changed. It became basically a standard prison, which was such a step up that prisoners cried for joy. They were allowed into common spaces to sit and talk to each other. They were allowed books and televisions and carboard scraps for art projects. They were allowed to study, and to go outside into a recreational area with the sky visible. And the result was that they didn’t have to fight and resist and get beaten all the time. The sadists among the guards had very little left to do. Adayfi learned English and business and art. Prisoners and guards struck up friendships.

In Act 3, in response to nothing, apparently due to a change in command, old rules and brutality were reintroduced, and the prisoners responded as before, back on hunger strike, and when intentionally provoked by damaging Qur’ans, back to violence. The guards destroyed all the art projects the prisoners had made. And the U.S. government offered to let Adayfi go if he would dishonestly testify in court against another prisoner. He refused.

When Mansoor Adayfi was finally freed, it was with no apology, except unofficially from a Colonel who admitted to knowing his innocence, and he was freed by forcing him to a place he did not know, Serbia, gagged, blindfolded, hooded, earmuffed, and shackled. Nothing had been learned, as the purpose of the whole enterprise had included from the start the avoidance of learning anything.
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August 30, 2021

The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed
Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.
- The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans.
- 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
- Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance.
- Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
- Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
- The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.
According to the American Psychological Association:
- 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress
- 62 percent were stressed about money
- 61 percent were stressed about work
- 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
- 43 percent were stressed about health care
Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.

Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave — by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.

High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:
- Inability to pay attention
- Decrease in visual perception
- Feeling agitated and unorganized
- Memory loss
- Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking
This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.

When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.

Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.

If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?

I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.

Would the folks who run things in God’s Country ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.

Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.

The Land of the Free incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.

Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.

Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?

If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.

Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.

“To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”

Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.

— The Mask of Anarchy, 1819
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August 10, 2021

Targeting Cuba and China: Disinformation against Communism
I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole.

— Mike Pompeo, former US secretary of state on how the United States conducts its business

One of the filters in the Propaganda Model propounded by professors Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky is stoking a fear of communism.¹ The establishment’s anti-communism has never abated in the United States. The elitists require a populace fearful of communism to protect their own misbegotten wealth accumulation. Thus,the bugaboo of communism must be opposed wherever it arises. At its worst, the US would wage war against communist countries such as North Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Yugoslavia. When not militarily attacked, communist governments will be demonized by a relentless campaign of disinformation designed to bring about the fall of the government and its replacement by a government amenable to the US establishment, as happened in the Soviet Union. That is the nature of imperialism and predatory capitalism.

The establishment’s anti-communism is alive and kicking in The Diplomat, a current-affairs magazine for the Asia-Pacific region. This one can readily glean from its article titled “How China Helps the Cuban Regime Stay Afloat and Shut Down Protests.”²

The in-one’s-face bias of the article’s heading and the subheading (“Chinese companies have played a key part in building Cuba’s telecommunications infrastructure, a system the regime uses to control its people, just as the CCP does within its own borders.”) immediately gives pause to the discerning reader. First, regime is a tendentious term meant to delegitimize a government. Second, the subheading asserts Chinese governmental control. While it points at the means, it does not provide any evidence that the assertion holds true.

The leaning of the writers is apparent from their bios: Leland Lazarus is a speechwriter to US Southern Command’s admiral Craig Faller, and Dr Evan Ellis is a research professor of Latin American Studies at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. They write, “July 11, thousands of people across Cuba took to the streets, fed up with the lack of food, basic products, medicine, and vaccines to combat COVID-19.”

This flash-in-the-pan, minor protest was allegedly orchestrated by the NED and US AID. Furthermore, the monopoly media narrative has been undermined by its use of fake and doctored images.³

The writers complain, “Protesters used social media to broadcast to the world what was happening, but the communist regime shut off the internet and telephone services, pulling the plug on their connection outside the island.”

A question: If your government is targeted by a barrage of disinformation from outside actors, would you allow for the disinformation to continue? Disinformation is hailed by many to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. And the disinformation campaigns of the US are myriad. Among them are the phantom missile attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the Viagra-fueled rapes in Libya, the Syrian government chemical-weapon attacks, and the current allegation of a genocide in Xinjiang, China. Millions of people died as a result of such disinformation.

It is clear that Lazarus and Ellis would like to knock down two communist governments that US capitalism finds antithetical, with one article. What is the crime of Cuba? The State Department Policy Planning Staff pointed to the “primary danger” the US faces, “The simple fact is that [former Cuban leader Fidel] Castro represents a successful defiance of the US…,”⁴ a slap in the face to the imperialist Monroe doctrine.

The writers turned to the old-school Cuba policy advocacy of US senator Marco Rubio who tweeted: “Expect the regime in #Cuba to block internet & cell phone service soon to prevent videos about what is happening to get out to the world… By the way, they use a system made, sold & installed by #China to control and block access to the internet in #Cuba.’”

Again, monopoly media undermines itself and senator Rubio: “… Fox News, however, included a small detail that went largely unnoticed. As he [Rubio] was speaking about ‘brutal oppression’ by the Cuban government and hailing the protesters, the footage shown by the cable station depicted a rally by Cuban government supporters. Fox News apparently knew exactly what it was airing, since it was careful to blur the slogans that some of the activists were carrying.”

Lazarus and Ellis see a sinister hand: “China’s role in helping the regime cut off communications during the protests has exposed one of the many ways Beijing helps keep the Cuban communist regime afloat.”

Meanwhile the capitalist⁵ government in the US is trying its damnedest to sink the communist government in Cuba. The US has long had an adversarial relationship with Cuba, starting with launching the Spanish-American War based on a lie concocted by US media. After the successful Cuban Revolution, the US has kept in place an economic blockade of the island. And seldom discussed is the fact that the US continues to occupy Guantánamo Bay, which Cuba has often demanded be returned to its sovereignty.

Since the article never mentions otherwise, it is assumed to be predicated upon the US and its Occidental allies not engaging in monitoring telecommunications and digital surveillance, which Edward Snowden has revealed to be patently false. This is not whataboutism because there is no evidence of a Chinese backdoor to Huawei and the company has pledged to not insert spying devices in its products; to do otherwise would be a bad business decision.

China’s Interests in Cuba

Lazarus and Ellis envision nefarious Chinese stratagems underlying their trade with Cuba:

China recognizes Cuba’s geostrategic importance. Due to its position in the Caribbean, Cuba can exert influence over the southeastern maritime approach to the United States, which contains vital sea lanes leading to ports in Miami, New Orleans, and Houston. Author George Friedman has argued that, with an increased presence in Cuba, China could potentially “block American ports without actually blocking them,” just like U.S. naval bases and installations pose a similar challenge to China around the first island chain and Straits of Malacca. Cuba’s influence in the Caribbean also makes it a useful proxy through which Beijing can pressure the four countries in the region (out of the 15 total globally) that recognize Taiwan to switch recognition.

The entire article is speculative. It is littered with words like “possible,” “can,” and “could.” The writers do not elaborate on how China might pressure the Caribbean countries. Usually countries switch allegiance to China from Taiwan based on financial inducements and not from hegemonic pressure.

Economic Support versus Economic Sanctions

The Diplomat writers argue that “China helps sustain the [Cuban] regime through economic engagement.”

What exactly do the writers intend to imply by economic engagement sustaining a regime? The logical corollary is that economic sanctions are aimed at “regime change.” Stemming from this logic, the US uses economic measures to sustain the theocratic criminality and corruption in Saudi Arabia and economic sanctions to try and change socialistic governments in, among others, Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Nonetheless, trade is what countries do to build their economies.

Regarding the US favored method of applying pressure, American academics John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote: “economic sanctions … may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history.”

The academics further noted,

It is interesting that this loss of human life has failed to make a great impression in the United States….

Some of the inattention may derive from a lack of concern about foreign lives. Although Americans are extremely sensitive to American casualties, they – like others – often seem quite insensitive to casualties suffered by those on the opposing side, whether military or civilian.

The world views economic sanctions in a different light from the US. This was illuminated by the UN General Assembly vote demanding an end to the US economic blockade on Cuba for the 29th year in a row. Aside from two negative votes cast by the US and its Israeli ally, 184 countries voted in favor of the resolution.

Perplexingly, the writers pointed out that “China has not, however, sold Cuba any significant weapons systems, as it has done with other states in the region such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.”

To the extent that selling armaments is a legitimate business, then why shouldn’t China sell armaments? Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia are not warring with other countries. Regarding the morality of selling weapons, consider that the US sells weapons to Saudi Arabia, a country committing genocide against Yemen and to Israel, a country that serially aggresses and economically strangulates Palestine. Are the writers not aware that the US pokes China in the eye by selling armaments to its renegade province, Taiwan, in contravention of the One-China policy to which the US shook hands?

“Digital Authoritarianism”

The writers complain about “China exporting ‘digital authoritarianism’ to illiberal regimes across the region. In Venezuela, Chinese telecommunication firm ZTE helped the Maduro regime establish the ‘fatherland ID card’ system, which it used to control not only voting, but the distribution of scarce food packages.”

As for the ID cards, the link provided by the writers notes that the “system could lead to abuses of privacy by Venezuela’s government.” Besides, which country does not require ID in order to cast a vote?

Why are the food packages scarce? What would one expect when the US has sanctions against Venezuela? It is quite disingenuous to criticize a government for food packages being scarce when that scarcity is caused by the writers’ own government. Moreover, the writers continue to use the word control pejoratively. Are the voting systems and economic distribution networks not a function of government implementation everywhere? If the writers want to insist that voting and the results are manipulated, then provide the evidence. Contrariwise, US observers endorsed the legitimacy of Venezuela’s May 2020 election; also, international observers were “unanimous in concluding that the elections were conducted fairly.” The link supplied by the writers is now dead, but the title reads: “For poor Venezuelans, a box of food may sway vote for Maduro.” While in Venezuela, a group of us visited the mercals — where food was being made affordable for the masses — where we were informed: “The Chavez administration does not want Venezuela’s food needs to be dependent on outside sources, so a concerted effort has been made to produce all foods locally.” Obviously that food independence is still a work in progress. Such progress is not made easier by being targeted by economic sanctions.

The writers make clear their anti-leftist and their anti-democracy views:

Leftist authoritarian regimes are consolidating control in Venezuela and Nicaragua. The populist left has returned to power in Bolivia in the form of the MAS party, in Argentina with the Peronists, and in Mexico with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and the Morena movement. In Peru, the recent election of Pedro Castillo, a teacher from Cajamarca with a radical left agenda, similarly raises alarm bells. Upcoming elections in the region raise the prospects for an even broader spread of the populist left, including the prospect of victory by Xiomara Castro in November 2021 elections in Honduras, a President Petro emerging from Colombia’s 2022 elections, or the return of Lula da Silva and his Workers’ Party in Brazil’s October 2022 elections.

Yikes! Democracy can be such a pain in the butt. As the anarchist professor Noam Chomsky wrote, “In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm.”⁶ For American elitists, “the United States supports democracy if, and only if, the outcomes accord with its strategic and economic objectives.”⁷ That the US did and would seek “regime change” in Latin America is borne out by its Operation Condor.

Lazarus and Ellis attempt to justify the US’ machinations against Cuba and China:

China’s continued efforts to prop up the Cuban regime matters to U.S. national security. For both good and bad, Cuba is connected to the United States through geographic proximity, historical connections, and family ties. The U.S. government has long focused on violations of the freedoms and human rights of the Cuban people.

The language of Lazarus and Ellis is oleaginous. Having a focus on human rights violations is qualitatively different from opposing human rights violations and quantitatively different from supporting human rights violations, as the US did when it supported the Fulgencio Batista “regime” (to use the parlance of Lazarus and Ellis) in Cuba, which served American corporate and military interests while massacring his own people. How does the occupation of Guantánamo Bay, where prisoners of war languish in what Amnesty International called the “gulag of our time”; the Bay of Pigs fiasco; Operation Northwoods; and economic sanctions speak for American fidelity to human rights?

The writers with ties to the US military accuse China of a “malign intent against the U.S. in cyberspace.” They reason that “Cuba could also be an area from which China could gather intelligence and conduct cyberattacks against the United States.”

The writers speculate about a malign Chinese intent. Malign intent is evidenced by the Stuxnet virus that the USA and Israel inserted into the Iranian nuclear program. The authors write as if the US is not guilty of the malignity they assert that China is guilty of.

How the United States Can Respond

Lazarus and Ellis argue that the US “should concentrate on helping partners in the region to engage with China in the most healthy, productive ways. For example, an emphasis on transparency inhibits the ability to engage in corrupt backroom deals with the Chinese that benefit the elites signing the deals rather than the country as a whole.”

Helping partners and advocating for transparency is great. Is this what the US does? It would be foolish to deny that the US does not engage with corrupt rulers, rulers who siphon off the loans meant for the people of the country who are then held responsible for the odious debt to the financial lenders?⁸

Lazarus and Ellis write, “With respect to cybersecurity, the United States should similarly look to increase support to partners in protecting their citizens’ privacy and security from malign actors like China.”

Let’s leave aside the unsupported allegation that China might be a malign actor. Instead, let’s ask what kind of actor is the US? Is it a benevolent actor? This is the actor that just recently ended a two-decade war in impoverished Afghanistan — a country where the US engaged in a cycle of war crimes. Ask yourself: is it a benevolent actor who engages in disinformation campaigns against countries like China that have eradicated absolute poverty (while in the US a 2019 measure of poverty showed a rate of 10.5%) and accuse it of the scurrilous and easily debunked allegation of committing genocide in Xinjiang? Is it an upstanding country that pursues the locking away of Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and elsewhere?

The writers suggest part of the solution for escaping Chinese spying is cybersecurity training by the US.

Is that a good idea — trusting Uncle Sam? If you get trained by the US and use US technology, then you might end up being surveilled by the US. Ask German chancellor Angela Merkel and dozens of other world leaders.

Lazarus and Ellis persist:

While recent events in Cuba show China’s growing influence in the region, the CCP’s emphatic support of the Cuban regime’s repressive acts also highlights that it is on the wrong side of history. The U.S. must deepen partnerships with Latin American countries and Caribbean friends.

Was the US on the right side of history in Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, historical Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Haiti, Chile, Grenada, etc? How should countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia and the other Latin American countries targeted by Operation Condor feel about a deepened partnership? And how would the peoples of Caribbean countries — e.g., Haiti, Grenada, Puerto Rico, etc — feel about a deepened partnership with the US?

Lazarus and Ellis proffer the haggard imperialist platitudes of partnership based on shared values, security, prosperity, and freedom. Which populations would they like to tempt with such an offer? To the people who experienced US-supported coups in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Bolivia, Brazil, or the masses in Venezuela subjected to unceasing American-government intrigues against their country? There is a reason why Latin Americans and Caribbean countries are leftists or turning leftward.
1. See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon Books, 2002 edition).
2. Throughout the article all emphases within quotations have been added by this writer.
3. See here, here, and here.
4. Cited in Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World? Metropolitan Books, 2014: 100.
5. Since the writers deem it important to identify the governments in China and Cuba as communist, it would seem appropriate and balanced to identify other governments by their ideology.
6. Chomsky, 45.
7. Chomsky, 74.
8. See Noam Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (Seven Stories Press, 1999). Chomsky describes how neoliberalism and financial institutions like the IMF and its structural adjustments have plunged the masses in developing countries into despair.
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July 27, 2021

Biden Is Imposing More Harsh Sanctions on Cuba — and Guantánamo Remains Open

As the United States imposes new Cuba sanctions, citing human rights abuses, we look at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a notorious gulag that President Biden himself has called an “advertisement for creating terror.” This month, the first Guantánamo Bay prisoner to be released under the Biden administration, Abdul Latif Nasser, returned to his home country of Morocco after nearly two decades of being held without charge even though he was cleared for release in 2016. There are 39 other prisoners still at Guantánamo, nearly two decades after the start of the U.S. war on terror. To discuss efforts to close the notorious prison and repatriate the remaining detainees, we are joined by Nasser’s lawyer Mark Maher of Reprieve and Gary Thompson, lawyer for former Guantánamo prisoner Ravil Mingazov, who is currently being held in a UAE prison after being released from Guantánamo in 2017, where he was held without charge for 15 years. “If there was ever a right and just time to be releasing these men, this is the time to do it,” says Maher.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

As the United States imposes new Cuba sanctions, citing human rights abuses, we turn to look at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This month, the first Guantánamo prisoner to be released under the Biden administration returned to his home country of Morocco. Fifty-six-year-old Abdul Latif Nasser was imprisoned for nearly two decades without charge and was cleared for release by the U.S. military since 2016. Thirty-nine prisoners remain at Guantánamo.

This comes as activists gathered last week in front of the Cultural Attaché Office for the United Arab Emirates in Washington, D.C., to protest the planned rendition of former Guantánamo prisoner Ravil Mingazov back to Russia. He’s currently being held in a UAE prison after being released from Guantánamo in 2017, where he, too, was held without charge for 15 years. Advocates say 17 other former Guantánamo prisoners are now locked up in the UAE under inhumane conditions. This is Helen Schietinger of Witness Against Torture.

HELEN SCHIETINGER: They’ve been tortured. These men will live with that for the rest of their lives. We owe them reparations. We need to make sure that they are in good situations, and continue to follow them and support them in attempting to make the rest of their lives fulfilled.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two lawyers representing these men. Gary Thompson is an attorney in private practice who has worked pro bono for Guantánamo prisoners. He is the lead attorney for former Guantánamo prisoner Ravil Mingazov. Also with us, Mark Maher, staff attorney for Reprieve US, who has represented six men imprisoned at Guantánamo, including Abdul Latif Nasser, who was just released to Morocco.

Mark, let’s begin with you. Can you tell us the circumstances under which he was just released? And what’s happening to Abdul Latif Nasser now?

MARK MAHER: Absolutely. Thank you for having me on.

So, the circumstances under which he was released actually begin back in 2016. As you said, Abdul Latif Nasser was held for close to two decades, 19 years, without charge or trial. He was actually cleared for release by the Periodic Review Board, which is a parole-like institution that was set up under Barack Obama’s presidency and is staffed by six members of federal agencies from the United States, including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They determined, unanimously, that Abdul Latif Nasser posed no threat to the United States or anybody, and determined that he should be released from Guantánamo.

Unfortunately, this determination came quite late in Barack Obama’s presidency and the State Department at that time deferred to the next administration, which, as we all know, was the Trump administration. President Trump had campaigned on the idea of not closing Guantánamo and, in fact, not transferring anyone out of Guantánamo, and largely kept to that promise.

So, even though Abdul Latif Nasser was cleared by senior civil servants from the U.S. government, he had to sit and wait until the political will within the United States changed. And as thrilled as we are that Abdul Latif Nasser is now out, that he is back in Morocco and is with his family and is trying to start a new life and is focused on the future, the fact remains that he lost close to two decades of his life, and that a number of men, 27 men, are still there without charge or trial, waiting for the political will of this administration to change, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Mark Maher, could you talk a little bit about how he came to end up in Guantánamo? How was he originally captured and transferred and detained there? And why did he never receive a trial?

MARK MAHER: Well, I can say that the reason why he never received a trial is the same reason why 27 of these men haven’t received a trial, either, and that’s because they have never faced any kind of charges at all. They’re being held essentially as prisoners of war.

Abdul Latif Nasser ended up in Guantánamo the way a lot of people ended up in Guantánamo. There was a bounty program, essentially, that was being run in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, I believe. The number, I might be getting wrong, but I believe what the bounties were being offered for turning over people to Afghan or American or Pakistani authorities was close to $5,000 at the time, which was a huge, life-changing amount of money. And we happen to know, in a lot of cases of people who ended up at Guantánamo, that they were the result of people lying about the people who ended up there, or simply mistaken identity.

That’s the case of another one of our clients who is still detained at Guantánamo Bay, Ahmed Rabbani. This story is actually detailed in the Senate torture report, that he was detained mistakenly because the United States believed he was another man, named Hassan Ghul. He was severely tortured, including techniques that haven’t been used since the Spanish Inquisition. The United States eventually actually detained Mr. Hassan Ghul at the same prison, Bagram, that Mr. Rabbani was being held at. Mr. Hassan Ghul was eventually released from there. But now, 20 years on, much like the situation that Abdul Latif Nasser found him in just a month ago, Ahmed Rabbani remains there. So, sadly, this is a situation that we’ve seen repeated for a number of the men who are still detained.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the calls have been growing for the Biden administration to close Guantánamo. How could that be done? And do you think it’s likely?

MARK MAHER: Well, one of the easiest ways is to begin with releasing the 10 men who have been cleared for transfer, and working to release all 27 of the men, who have never been, again, charged with any crime or have faced a trial. It’s unlikely that any of those men will ever face any trial. This is especially true in light of the fact that, as I think your viewers and listeners will know, the Biden administration has announced that the War in Afghanistan is supposed to completely end by — I think mid-August was the last estimate that they had. And I believe earlier in the show, we heard President Biden saying that combat troops will be exiting Iraq by the end of the year. That says to me, and I think to a lot of observers, that the wars that led to these people being wrongly imprisoned in Guantánamo are ending.

If there was ever a right and just time to be releasing these men, this is the time to do it. The only thing that might be lacking from moving these men out of there is political will. If they haven’t been charged with anything, if they haven’t faced trial for anything, if the wars are over, then the question isn’t what can the Biden administration do to solve this problem; the question should be: What justification does the Biden administration still have to be detaining these people?

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Gary Thompson into the conversation, the attorney who worked pro bono for Guantánamo prisoners and is the lead attorney for Ravil Mingazov, who is a former Guantánamo prisoner. Can you tell us his full story and then where he’s ended up today, how he started at Guantánamo?

GARY THOMPSON: Yeah. Thank you very much.

Ravil Mingazov is from an area in Russia called Tatarstan. And he began to practice his chosen religion freely in the late 1990s. He was a professional ballet dancer, then drafted into the Russian army, and came to a point in his life where he decided he wanted to leave Russia and flee religious persecution simply to live a life of religious freedom with his wife and then-young baby. They attempted to travel south. Only Ravil made it across the border into Tajikistan, Afghanistan and then Pakistan, where he was arrested in March 2002 by Pakistani police and, as Mark Maher mentioned, also sold for bounty to United States authorities, who took him to Bagram, took him to Kandahar and tortured him. He suffered extreme interrogation and supposedly confessed under duress. He was then taken to Guantánamo in October of 2002, where he suffered greatly for many years under harsh conditions and sometimes solitary confinement.

Eventually, he was permitted to have counsel, which is where we came in. And we filed a petition for habeas corpus. And in 2010, here in D.C., where I live, Judge Henry Kennedy issued the writ of habeas corpus and ordered the United States government to release Ravil Mingazov from Guantánamo. Believe it or not, it then went through a — the case then went through a six-year Kafkaesque appellate cycle where he was not released. And then, in 2010, Ravil also went through a Periodic Review Board hearing, like Mr. Nasser, that Mark mentioned, and that same panel cleared Ravil for release.

It then took the State Department about six months to locate a country for Ravil to go to. He cannot go back to Russia, because Russia has a record of killing or torturing ex-Guantánamo detainees returned to them. So, we thought it was our lucky day when it was confirmed that Ravil could go to the United Arab Emirates, where several other or a dozen other ex-detainees also went. It was always Ravil’s dream to be in an Arab country. He learned Arabic in Guantánamo. He understood Arabic culture. He wanted to be there. And we really celebrated that day. Ravil was on the last plane out of Guantánamo the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated, so it really felt like we had dodged something terrible.

We were promised by our State Department that the UAE had promised them that Ravil would be released in six months, that he would be treated humanely, that he would be given a job and a place to live in about six months’ time, which is similar to the Saudi program for ex-Guantánamo detainees. It didn’t come to pass. It turned out that the UAE lied to the United States government. These so-called diplomatic assurances were simply all lies.

And Ravil, along with about two dozen other men, have suffered even more in UAE prisons, most notoriously the al-Razeen prison, these now four-and-a-half years. And they’re not permitted review by the International Red Cross or Red Crescent. They’ve been able to get out sporadic calls to their families with the help of Reprieve, where Mr. Maher works. The dots have been connected. We know there’s torture there. We know there’s mistreatment. And the men stuck in the UAE, like Ravil, have all said it’s worse than Guantánamo. Worse than Guantánamo. So, that’s why, with 18 men still there, we call the UAE “Gitmo East,” as opposed to “Gitmo West.” And with the numbers at Gitmo dwindling now to 39, with 18 in the UAE, they’re really a pair.

And if Biden is serious about closing Guantánamo, he needs to and his State Department needs to look into the concept of re-resettlement, look at people like Ravil Mingazov, some of the Chinese Uyghurs —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Gary Thompson —

GARY THOMPSON: [inaudible]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Gary Thompson, if I can, I just wanted to ask you about this particular issue of the UAE as Gitmo of the East. To your knowledge, what has been the U.S. government’s reaction to basically offloading its Gitmo prisoners to another gulag?

GARY THOMPSON: Totally complicit. The UAE — passed all these men off to the UAE and, as far as we know, did absolutely nothing to follow up on those diplomatic assurances. Apparently, our State Department, at least under Donald Trump, just didn’t care, didn’t care that they were lied to. And we’ve seen no evidence that our State Department, even now, under the Biden administration, is really doing anything to remedy the situation in the UAE. Some people in the State Department have told us they’re, you know, quote, “working on it” or they’re in touch with people in the UAE. But we’re seeing nothing. And in the meantime, we’re getting very, very scared that Ravil might be rendered to Russia or, in the case of the Yemenis who in the UAE, that their fate might take them back to Yemen, where they could suffer greatly.

AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to remind people what Joe Biden said in the last Democratic presidential debate, when he was asked by PBS moderator Yamiche Alcindor about closing Guantánamo.

YAMICHE ALCINDOR: Vice President Biden, why couldn’t you close Guantánamo Bay? Why couldn’t the Obama administration close Guantánamo Bay?

JOE BIDEN: We attempted to close Guantánamo Bay, but you have to have congressional authority to do it. They’ve kept it open. And the fact is that we in fact think it’s the greatest — it is an advertisement for creating terror.

AMY GOODMAN: “It is an advertisement for creating terror,” the image of Guantánamo around the world, the fact of it. Mark Maher, your final words?

MARK MAHER: The only thing that — the only two things that I would add were to kind of hone in on something that Gary was saying there. He mentioned having petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus back in 2010. That would have been during Barack Obama’s presidency. And that means his Justice Department was opposing that petition for a writ of habeas corpus. We found ourself in a similar situation with our client, Asadullah Haroon Gul. His Justice Department, Mr. Biden’s, President Biden’s Justice Department took the same position that President Bush’s, President Obama’s, President Trump’s did, which is to attempt —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds. What should Biden do?

MARK MAHER: — attempt — he should stop opposing these petitions for writ of habeas corpus and begin releasing all of the uncharged men who remain in Guantánamo Bay.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank Mark Maher and Gary Thompson, lawyers for at least two of the Guantánamo prisoners. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Stay safe.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 15, 2021

Guantánamo Memoir Film Skewers George W. Bush, But Exonerates Barack Obama

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo memoir, Guantánamo Diary, is a book of remarkable power. Written during his incarceration and heavily redacted in its first editions, Slahi’s story speaks with first-hand authority of the horror, degradation and brutality of life inside Guantánamo. It has the gravity of a historically significant document of state torture and the rich, intimate texture of a profoundly personal story.

The same cannot really be said of Kevin MacDonald’s film adaptation of it, The Mauritanian, which was released earlier this year. Though culture site Tatler called the movie “excellent,” and French-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim’s turn as Slahi has been roundly praised, the critical response has been fairly muted, certainly in comparison to the widespread acclaim that greeted Slahi’s book. The Guardian, for instance, said that the movie “is content with congratulating itself for being on the right side of history.” British right-of-center broadsheet The Telegraph called it “no-one’s idea of a thrill,” and film magazine Empire labelled it “well-intentioned but somewhat dull.” Despite the involvement of Hollywood heavy-hitters Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in key roles, the film has failed to set the world on fire.

And yet, many of the reviews have so far failed to notice one particularly intriguing aspect of The Mauritanian. Like dour thrillers of the early years of the “war on terror” such as Gavin Hood’s Rendition, which raise complex problems only to defuse them when prisoners are rescued and the dastardly senators responsible for the torture program get what they deserve, The Mauritanian is an oddly unsatisfying exposé of the torture program. In fact, its limitations reveal very clearly the political limits of much liberal critique of Guantánamo. Bob Brecher, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Brighton, U.K., cautions against “the liberal conceit that there is a simple relationship between what torture is and how it is represented,” adding that “liberal good intentions and their ideological consequences” are often overlooked in the discussion of torture. The Mauritanian is a particularly good example of the lack of depth found in much liberal condemnation of Guantánamo.

Any filmic critique of Guantánamo is, of course, welcome and politically important. The 20-year history of the American island gulag, and the post-9/11 torture program of which it remains the most well-known manifestation, are some of the most important and enduring political scandals of the modern age. And yet they risk losing urgency for many people due to the labyrinthine complexity of the political issues at stake and, frankly, the boredom factor that results from the grinding slowness and obscurity of the legal process.

The Mauritanian, then, as a film that accessibly exposes the violence of the torture regime and the legal wrangling involved with defending people accused of terrorism — and that humanizes a detainee in the process! — does valuable and necessary work. But it is the parameters of what the film is and is not able to criticize that really makes it interesting.

One of The Mauritanian’s strongest scenes comes roughly two-thirds of the way into the story. Slahi’s ACLU lawyer, Nancy Hollander (Foster) and his military prosecutor-in-waiting, Stuart Couch (Cumberbatch), have both been running into insurmountable obstacles when investigating Slahi’s case. Finally, they each encounter authoritative unredacted documentation of the horrendous torture that was committed against Slahi. As we, the audience, see this degrading treatment from his perspective, the two other lead characters read about it and finally experience a powerful revelation about the shocking torture and routine cruelty that characterize life in Guantánamo. A later scene stages a similar revelation as Slahi gets his day in court and testifies via video link from Guantánamo. He is articulate, dignified, funny and humble; his humanity, as they say, shines through, and soon enough his case is dismissed and he is declared eligible for release. These scenes are interesting because they stage a certain idea about scandal. The truth is exposed, and then, as a direct and uncomplicated consequence, justice is done. Once Couch realizes that Slahi was tortured, he refuses to prosecute the case; once the court sees that Slahi is innocent, he is declared free to go.

The story is misleadingly positive, ending on a high note in which American justice prevails. Anybody familiar with Guantánamo will tell you that this is emphatically not the message to take from Guantánamo.

Such an understanding of scandal is not only oversimplified, but misleading. Jamie Johnson, a scholar of militarization working in Leicester, U.K., writes that scandal is integral to the way that we understand modern war. This is because the gesture which marks some violent acts (i.e., war crimes, extraordinary rendition, torture) as excessive also marks others as acceptable. That is, when we “expose the truth,” we are not, of course, allowing the light of truth to directly shine through on its own: we are staging a very particular narrative aimed at specific people and for a specific audience, a narrative which draws boundaries around what we are and are not willing to criticize.

He continues:

This form of critique, in which ‘excesses’ are exposed and corrected through official channels of accountability, often works to limit how we understand and respond to certain events. Take, for example, the idea of the war crime. The category of the war crime asserts that there are certain ‘excessive’ acts of violence that are scandalous. However, if you can commit a ‘crime’ against war then presumably there are other forms of violence that are ‘on the right side of the line’. The function of this category is therefore to implicitly endorse and accept these other forms of ‘unremarkable’ state-sanctioned violence. We must therefore be careful not to approach practices of torture and rendition in the Global War on Terror as a scandalous ‘excess’. Doing so fails to do justice to the pervasive harms and injustices that have been done to people around the world in the name of fighting terror.

The Mauritanian is interesting because it highlights government-sanctioned atrocities but also simultaneously emphasizes their solution: Bush and Cheney are beaten in court because the justice system functions effectively enough to check executive power. The story is, therefore, misleadingly positive, ending on a high note in which American justice prevails. Anybody familiar with Guantánamo will tell you that this is emphatically not the message to take from Guantánamo.

What is more, by ending on Slahi’s triumph in court, The Mauritanian only tells the story of roughly half of Slahi’s time in Guantánamo. Slahi was detained for 15 years under Presidents Bush and Obama, but the movie ends eight years into his illegal detention after he wins a landmark legal case against the Bush administration in which he is granted the right of habeas corpus. His seven more years in Guantánamo, when this right was withheld at Obama’s express instruction, are reduced to three brief title cards at the end of the film.

[The] framing of the story emphasizes Slahi’s victory against the evil Bush and Cheney at the expense of any examination of Obama or Biden’s complicity in the continuing scandal of Guantánamo.

This is especially ironic given that the film is centrally concerned with redaction. Whole pages of Slahi’s book were blacked out in its first edition, with the selective removal of crucial details and sentences throughout the book making many other parts of it incredibly difficult to follow (this is, of course, the point of redaction). Likewise, when Hollander finally gets access to the legal files that she needs to defend Slahi, it is box after box after box of redacted documentation.

Though it foregrounds government censorship, The Mauritanian, too, is a redacted version of Slahi’s story. Slahi himself is pleased with the adaptation, though he acknowledges that the prison environment and savage mistreatment depicted in the movie is “like the soft version of Guantánamo Bay.” But nobody would ask for the torture scenes to be any grimmer: most importantly, the film forces a generic and sentimental legal thriller happy ending, which is inappropriate given the horrendous and damning facts of Slahi’s case.

The final movement of the film is dedicated to Slahi’s triumphant courtroom speech and his subsequent joy at the judge’s decision in his favor. This framing of the story emphasizes Slahi’s victory against the evil Bush and Cheney at the expense of any examination of Obama or Biden’s complicity in the continuing scandal of Guantánamo. Slahi has become known for his extraordinary capacity for forgiveness — “I’ve wholeheartedly forgiven everyone,” he has said — and it is undoubtedly true that there is something powerful, and moving, about this. But for The Mauritanian to reproduce this forgiveness echoes Obama’s policy of “looking forward rather than backward” — that is, his policy of refusing to prosecute the perpetrators and architects of the torture program. Slahi’s personal, spiritual act of forgiveness, however inspirational, does not license a distorted or selective account of the political responsibility for Guantánamo, which is shared by both Republicans and Democrats.

Of course, no movie can get everything right. In a 2017 article on the 2014 Senate Torture Report, Lucia H. Seyfarth writes, quite reasonably, that “truth-telling is an area where the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.” But this omission of the more systematic complicity of U.S. policy, politics and society really matters. It exonerates Obama of his most important broken promise, and it makes Guantánamo seem a uniquely Republican atrocity, when in fact, Guantánamo and the torture program are emblematic of the overreach, impunity and atrocity of U.S. empire that is served by politicians on all sides of party politics.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 13, 2021

Russian Guantánamo Prisoner Released to UAE at Risk of Torture Upon Repatriation

United Nations human rights special rapporteurs expressed serious concerns on July 2 about the “the imminent forced repatriation of former Guantánamo detainee Ravil Mingazov from the United Arab Emirates [UAE] to Russia, saying he faced substantial risk of torture and ill-treatment upon his return.”

One of the last prisoners to be released the day before Obama’s presidency ended in 2017, and one of 23 prisoners transferred to the UAE, Mingazov is one of 19 former prisoners who remain there, along with 18 Yemenis. In a July 2020 letter to the UAE government, which has received no response, the experts expressed concerns about the safety of the former prisoners and their conditions, as they remain in detention and largely without access to family, lawyers and independent medical care — in some cases, over six years after their transfer — and the secret terms of the assurances given to the U.S. in the resettlement agreement.

These concerns were followed in October 2020 by calls to halt the potential forced and unlawful repatriation of the 18 Yemenis. As concerns these men, the experts stated, “While we welcome the Government’s decision not to repatriate these Yemeni nationals we continue to be gravely concerned at their indefinite detention at an undisclosed location, without charge or trial, with extremely restricted family contact, no legal representation and recurrent periods of prolonged solitary confinement.”

On the other hand, the experts are now concerned that “Mr. Mingazov has been subjected to continuous arbitrary detention at an undisclosed location in the UAE, which amounts to enforced disappearance [… and] risks being forcibly repatriated to Russia despite the reported risk of torture and arbitrary detention based on his religious beliefs.”

In recent weeks, the Russian authorities have visited his family home in preparation for his repatriation. The experts have said, “Any repatriation process happening without full respect for procedural guarantees, including an individualized risk assessment, would violate the absolute prohibition of refoulement.” His family have not received any official information about his planned repatriation.

One of eight Russian nationals held at Guantánamo, Mingazov was the only one not to be returned to the Russian Federation in 2004. Like the others, he had fled religious persecution in his homeland and insisted he should not be returned there. The seven men who were made to return in 2004 have faced ongoing persecution, arbitrary detention, torture, spurious charges and one was shot dead by security officers in the street in 2007.

Although in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked the U.S. for the continuing human rights abuses and lawlessness at Guantánamo, the risk of torture, persecution and forced repatriation to Russia remains quite real. In February, the European Court of Human Rights found the Russian authorities guilty of torture, forced confessions and unfair convictions in the cases of a number of Muslim men from the North Caucasus. In April, a number of human rights organizations condemned France following the forced deportation of a Chechen asylum seeker, a victim of torture and a witness in a torture investigation against the Chechen authorities, in contravention of a court order and international law, to Russia, where he was abducted two days after his deportation, and where he remains “at high risk of torture.”

Mingazov’s situation means he is essentially in the same position in which he found himself in 2016 when the periodic review board at Guantánamo Bay cleared him for release to the UAE: between a rock and a hard place. He has simply moved from indefinite arbitrary detention at the hands of the U.S. to detention for the past four years at the hands of the UAE sanctioned by the U.S. The threat of repatriation to the Russian Federation has long been there too.

Men like Ravil Mingazov, who were never charged or tried at Guantánamo, found themselves “resettled” in further uncertainty and sometimes persecution in third states.

In 2016, however, Mingazov had one other potential option. His ex-wife and teenage son are refugees in the United Kingdom. His lawyers applied for him to join them but this was turned down by the close U.S. ally. In a question in parliament by MP Tom Brake days before Mingazov was sent to the UAE, the British government, while refusing to comment on any asylum claim, admitted that, “The Government received a request from the U.S. Government to allow the transfer of Ravil Mingazov from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the UK. After careful consideration, the Government declined this request.” Since the U.S. could not rely on allies who claim to uphold human rights, men like Ravil Mingazov, who were never charged or tried at Guantánamo, found themselves “resettled” in further uncertainty and sometimes persecution in third states.

Along with the death in March 2021 of former Tunisian prisoner, Lotfi Ben Ali, who was released in 2014 to Kazakhstan, which later expelled him, and who died in Mauritania suffering from multiple medical problems, Mingazov’s case raises important questions for the Biden administration’s stance on Guantánamo.

Typically, the U.S. has chosen to wash its hands of prisoners once they are transferred, even though it continues to enforce close surveillance of them, regardless of the conditions — arbitrary detention, harassment by the authorities, poverty, homelessness — that they may find themselves in. Nonetheless, as survivors of torture, the men have a right to rehabilitation.

In Mingazov’s case, the Biden administration must take immediate action to remedy what has been almost two decades of torture and indefinite arbitrary detention by intervening and ensuring that he is not subject to forced repatriation to the Russian Federation, and if he cannot live in freedom and humane conditions in the UAE, to ensure his transfer to a country where he can.

There has been much optimism over the Biden administration and its reported stance on Guantánamo. Yet, amid calls to reinstate the measures once used by the man to whom he served as vice president, there must be consideration of the consequences of Obama’s tactics, of which both these men, who were transferred by his administration, are victims. Many of the 197 prisoners Obama resettled in third states were often also transferred under dubious trade and diplomatic arrangements and with questionable assurances given by states in return.

Almost 20 years on, although 40 prisoners remain at Guantánamo, after a peak of almost 800, the impact of Guantánamo detention on the individuals and communities affected is seldom taken into consideration unless it can be used as an excuse for further belligerence, extralegal detention elsewhere or to justify further human rights abuses by the U.S. and its allies.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 2, 2021

The Known Knowns of Donald Rumsfeld

“On the morning of September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld ran to the fire at the Pentagon to assist the wounded and ensure the safety of survivors,” expressed a mournful George W. Bush in a statement. “For the next five years, he was in steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill, and honor.”

Long before Donald Trump took aim at irritating facts and dissenting eggheads, Donald Rumsfeld, two times defense secretary and key planner behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was doing his far from negligible bit. When asked at his confirmation hearing about what worried him most when he went to bed at night, he responded accordingly: intelligence. “The danger that we can be surprised because of a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.”

Hailing from Chicago, he remained an almost continuous feature of the Republic’s politics for decades, burying himself in the business-government matrix. He was a Congressman three times. He marked the Nixon and Ford administrations, respectively serving as head of the Office of Economic Opportunity and Defense Secretary. At 43, he was the youngest defense secretary appointee in the imperium’s history.

He returned to the role of Pentagon chief in 2001, though not before running the pharmaceutical firm G.D. Searle and making it as a Fortune 500 CEO. It was under his stewardship that the US Food and Drugs Administration finally approved the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame. A report by a 1980 FDA Board of Inquiry had claimed that the drug “might induce brain tumors.” This did not phase Rumsfeld, undeterred by such fanciful notions as evidence.

With Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, and Rumsfeld’s membership of the transition team, the revolving door could go to work. The new FDA Commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr., was selected while Rumsfeld remained Searle’s CEO. When Searle reapplied for approval of aspartame, Hayes, as the new FDA commissioner, appointed a 5-person Scientific Commission to review the 1980 findings. When it became evident that a 3-2 outcome approving the ban was in the offing, Hayes appointed a sixth person. The deadlocked vote was broken by Hayes, who favoured aspartame.

In responding to the attacks of September 11, 2001 on US soil, Rumsfeld laid the ground for an assault on inconvenient evidence. As with aspartame, he was already certain about what he wanted. Even as smoke filled the corridors of the Pentagon, punctured by the smouldering remains of American Airlines Flight 77, Rumsfeld was already telling the vice-chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff General Richard Myers to find the “best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit SH@same time – not only UBL.” (Little effort is needed to work out that SH was Saddam Hussein and UBL Usama/Osama Bin Laden.)

Experts were given a firm trouncing – what would they know? With Rumsfeld running the Pentagon, the scare mongers and ideologues took the reins, all working on the Weltanschauung summed up at that infamous press conference of February 12, 2002. When asked if there was any evidence as to whether Iraq had attempted to or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, given “reports that there is no evidence of a direct link”, Rumsfeld was ready with a tongue twister. “There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” This was being frightfully disingenuous, given that the great known for Rumsfeld was the need to attack Iraq.

To that end, he authorised the creation of a unit run by the under-secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, known as the Office of Special Plans, to examine intelligence on Iraq’s capabilities independently of the CIA. Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit a year prior to the invasion, described the OSP’s operations in withering terms. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”

One of Rumsfeld’s favourite assertions – that Iraq had a viable nuclear weapons program – did not match the findings behind closed doors. “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program,” claimed a report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “is based largely – perhaps 90% – on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

None of this derailed the juggernaut: the US was going to war. Not that Rumsfeld was keen to emphasise his role in it. “While the president and I had many discussions about the war preparations,” he notes in his memoirs, “I do not recall him ever asking me if I thought going to war with Iraq was the right decision.”

With forces committed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States found itself in the situation Rumsfeld boastfully claimed would never happen. Of this ruinously bloody fiasco, Rumsfeld was dismissive: “stuff happens.” Despite such failings, a list of words he forbade staff from using was compiled, among them “quagmire”, “resistance” and “insurgents”. Rumsfeld, it transpired, had tried regime change on the cheap, hoping that a modest military imprint was all that was necessary. The result: the US found itself in Iraq from March 2003 to December 2011, and then again in 2013 with the rise of Islamic State. Afghanistan continues to be garrisoned, with the US scheduled to leave a savaged country by September.

Rumsfeld was not merely a foe of facts that might interfere with his policy objective. Conventions and laws prohibiting torture were also sneered at. On December 2, 2002, he signed a memorandum from General Counsel William J. Haynes II authorising the use of 20-hour interrogations, stress positions and the use of phobias for Guantanamo Bay detainees. In hand writing scrawled at the bottom of the document, the secretary reveals why personnel should not be too soft on their quarry, as he would “stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?” The results were predictably awful, and revelations of torture by US troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 led him to offer his resignation, which President Bush initially rejected.

By November 2006, military voices had turned against him. With the insurgency in full swing and Iraq sliding into chaos, the Army Times called for the secretary’s resignation. “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear the brunt.” Bush eventually relented.

It is interesting that so little of this was remarked upon during the Trump era, seen as a disturbing diversion from the American project. When Trump came to office, Democrats and others forgave all that came before, ignoring the manure that enriched the tree of mendacity. The administration of George W. Bush was rehabilitated.

In reflecting on his documentary on Rumsfeld Errol Morris found himself musing like his protagonist. “He’s a mystery to me, and in many ways, he remains a mystery to me – except for the possibility that there might not be a mystery.” The interlocutor had turned into his subject.
The post The Known Knowns of Donald Rumsfeld first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
June 21, 2021

Trump Asked Aides About Sending Infected Americans to Guantánamo, New Book Says

Former President Donald Trump reportedly asked his advisers during the start of the pandemic if he could send United States citizens to Guantánamo Bay if they were returning from overseas infected with coronavirus.

The account that Trump considered sending COVID-infected Americans to the infamous detention facility that’s presently housing individuals suspected of terrorism has been revealed in a new book by Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta, titled Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History.

The book describes the Trump administration’s “dysfunctional response to the unfolding pandemic,” according to an article from The Post detailing these revelations. Nightmare Scenario relied on more than 180 interviews, including many with White House senior aides and government health officials during Trump’s time in office.

According to the book, Trump had asked his advisers about options for handling infected Americans returning to the U.S. as the pandemic was unfolding during a meeting in February 2020.

“Don’t we have an island that we own? What about Guantánamo?” Trump reportedly asked.

White House aides were stunned by the former president’s question. After Trump asked about it a second time, his advisers tried to dismiss his suggestion, fearful of the political consequences if implemented.

Trump appeared resistant to the idea that Americans be allowed to return to their homes. “We import goods. We are not going to import a virus,” he said during the meeting.

Trump was obsessed with how many Americans were being counted as infected, the book claims, as he blamed COVID testing for harming his political image. In a phone conversation with then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in mid-March, Trump lambasted efforts to increase testing.

“I’m going to lose the election because of testing!” Trump reportedly said. “What idiot had the federal government do testing?”

Azar reminded Trump that it was his son-in-law who had, days earlier, announced he would head the country’s testing. The former president complained that it was “gross incompetence” by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to have developed a test for COVID-19.

While Trump and his advisers were scrambling behind the scenes to come up with a plan to deal with the virus, in public Trump continued to insist, wrongly, that the virus would disappear on its own, “like a miracle,” or that it wasn’t as big of a threat that disease experts were making it out to be. During political rallies, he also described criticisms of his actions (and inaction) in the early weeks of the pandemic as a new “hoax” created by his political adversaries.

Speaking privately to Bob Woodward, however, Trump also acknowledged that he was aware the virus was dangerous, telling the veteran journalist that coronavirus was “more deadly than… even your strenuous flus,” contradicting what he was saying at the time to the American people. Trump also said he purposely “wanted to always play it down,” telling Woodward he didn’t want to cause a panic in the country.

The missteps that were taken on early in the pandemic, combined with the failure of the Trump administration to unequivocally support necessary public health measures such as mask wearing and social distancing, contributed to the enormous death toll in the United States. By the time Trump exited office in January of this year, more than 400,000 Americans had died due to COVID-19. Had Trump taken more proactive steps in combating the spread of the virus (in addition to the U.S. health care system being better prepared for a pandemic), it’s estimated that around 40 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. — or approximately 160,000 of the 400,000 figure — could have been avoided, according to a report published by the Lancet Commission.

“[I]nstead of galvanizing the U.S. populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation,” the report, published earlier this year, said.

As of June 15, more than 600,000 have died from the virus.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
May 4, 2021

If Biden Wants to Truly End War on Terror, He Must Release Guantánamo Prisoners

The Guantánamo conundrum never seems to end.

Twelve years ago, I had other expectations. I envisioned a writing project that I had no doubt would be part of my future: an account of Guantánamo’s last 100 days. I expected to narrate in reverse, the episodes in a book I had just published, The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, about — well, the title makes it all too obvious — the initial days at that grim offshore prison. They began on January 11, 2002, as the first hooded prisoners of the American war on terror were ushered off a plane at that American military base on the island of Cuba.

Needless to say, I never did write that book. Sadly enough, in the intervening years, there were few signs on the horizon of an imminent closing of that U.S. military prison. Weeks before my book was published in February 2009, President Barack Obama did, in fact, promise to close Guantánamo by the end of his first year in the White House. That hope began to unravel with remarkable speed. By the end of his presidency, his administration had, in fact, managed to release 197 of the prisoners held there without charges — many, including Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the subject of the film The Mauritanian, had also been tortured — but 41 remained, including the five men accused but not yet tried for plotting the 9/11 attacks. Forty remain there to this very day.

Nearly 20 years after it began, the war in Afghanistan that launched this country’s Global War on Terror and the indefinite detention of prisoners in that facility offshore of American justice is now actually slated to end. President Biden recently insisted that it is indeed “time to end America’s longest war” and announced that all American troops would be withdrawn from that country by September 11th, the 20th anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on the United States.

It makes sense, of course, that the conclusion of those hostilities would indeed be tied to the closure of the now-notorious Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Unfortunately, for reasons that go back to the very origins of the war on terror, ending the Afghan part of this country’s “forever wars” may not presage the release of those “forever prisoners,” as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg so aptly labeled them years ago.

Biden and Guantánamo

Just as President Biden has a history, dating back to his years as Obama’s vice-president, of wanting to curtail the American presence in Afghanistan, so he called years ago for the closure of Guantánamo. As early as June 2005, then-Senator Biden expressed his desire to shut that facility, seeing it as a stain on this country’s reputation abroad.

At the time, he proposed that an independent commission take a look at Guantánamo Bay and make recommendations as to its future. “But,” he said then, “I think we should end up shutting it down, moving those prisoners. Those that we have reason to keep, keep. And those we don’t, let go.” Sixteen years later, he has indeed put in motion an interagency review to look into that detention facility’s closing. Hopefully, once he receives its report, his administration can indeed begin to shut the notorious island prison down. (And this time, it could even work.)

It’s true that, in 2021, the idea of shutting the gates on Guantánamo has garnered some unprecedented mainstream support. As part of his confirmation process, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, for instance, signaled his support for its closure. And Congress, long unwilling to lend a hand, has offered some support as well. On April 16th, 24 Democratic senators signed a letter to the president calling that facility a “symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses” that “continues to harm U.S. national security” and demanding that it be shut.

As those senators wrote,

“For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world. In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.”

Admittedly, the number of signatories on that letter raises many questions, including why there aren’t more (and why there isn’t a single Republican among them). Is it just a matter of refusing to give up old habits or does it reflect a lack of desire to address an issue long out of the headlines? Where, for example, was Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s name, not to mention those other 25 missing Democratic senatorial signatures?

And there’s another disappointment lurking in its text. While those senators correctly demanded a reversal of the Trump administration’s “erroneous and troubling legal positions” regarding the application of international and domestic law to Guantánamo, they failed to expand upon the larger context of that forever nightmare of imprisonment, lawlessness, and cruelty that affected the war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo as well as at the CIA’s “black sites” around the world.

Still, that stance by those two-dozen senators is significant, since Congress has, in the past, taken such weak positions on closing the prison. As such, it provides some hope for the future.

For the rest of Congress and the rest of us, when thinking about finally putting Guantánamo in the history books, it’s important to remember just what a vast deviation it proved to be from the law, justice, and the norms of this society. It’s also worth thinking about the American “detainees” there in the context of what normally happens when wars end.

Prisoners of War

Defying custom and law, the American war in Afghanistan broke through norms like a battering ram through a gossamer wall. Guantánamo was created in just that context, a one-of-a-kind institution for this country. Now, so many years later, it’s poised to break through yet another norm.

Usually, at the end of hostilities, battlefield detainees are let go. As Geneva Convention III, the law governing the detention and treatment of prisoners of war, asserts: “Prisoners of war shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.”

That custom of releasing prisoners has, in practice, pertained not only to those held on or near the battlefield but even to those detained far from the conflict. Before the Geneva Conventions were created, the custom of releasing such prisoners was already in place in the United States. Notably, during World War II, the U.S. held 425,000 mostly German prisoners in more than 500 camps in this country. When the war ended, however, they were released and the vast majority of them were returned to their home countries.

When it comes to the closure of Guantánamo, however, we can’t count on such an ending. Two war-on-terror realities stand in the way of linking the coming end of hostilities in Afghanistan to the shutting down of that prison. First, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that Congress passed right after the 9/11 attacks was not geographically defined or limited to the war in Afghanistan. It focused on but was not confined to two groups, the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as well as anyone else who had contributed to the attacks of 9/11. As such, it was used as well to authorize military engagements — and the capture of prisoners — outside Afghanistan. Since 2001, in fact, it has been cited to authorize the use of force in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.Of the 780 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay at one time or another, more than a third came from Afghanistan; the remaining two-thirds were from 48 other countries.

A second potential loophole exists when it comes to the release of prisoners as that war ends. The administration of George W. Bush rejected the very notion that those held at Guantánamo were prisoners of war, no matter how or where they had been captured. As non-state actors, according to that administration, they were exempted from prisoner of war status, which is why they were deliberately labeled “detainees.”

Little wonder then that, despite Secretary of Defense Austin’s position on Guantánamo, as the New York Times recently reported, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby “argued that there was no direct link between its future and the coming end to what he called the ‘mission’ in Afghanistan.”

In fact, even if that congressional authorization for war and the opening of Guantánamo on which it was based never were solely linked to the conflict in Afghanistan, it’s time, almost two decades later, to put an end to that quagmire of a prison camp and the staggering exceptions that it’s woven into this country’s laws and norms since 2002.

A “Forever Prison”?

The closing of Guantánamo would finally signal an end to the otherwise endless proliferation of exceptions to the laws of war as well as to U.S. domestic and military legal codes. As early as June 2004, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor flagged the possibility that a system of indefinite detention at Guantánamo could create a permanent state of endless legal exceptionalism.

She wrote an opinion that month in a habeas corpus case for the release of a Guantánamo detainee, the dual U.S.-Saudi citizen Yaser Hamdi, warning that the prospect of turning that military prison into a never-ending exception to wartime detention and its laws posed dangers all its own. As she put it, “We understand Congress’ grant of authority for the use of ‘necessary and appropriate force’ to include the authority to detain for the duration of the relevant conflict, and our understanding is based on longstanding law-of-war principles.” She also acknowledged that, “If the practical circumstances of a given conflict are entirely unlike those of the conflicts that informed the development of the law of war, that [the] understanding [of release upon the end of hostilities] may unravel. But,” she concluded, “that is not the situation we face as of this date.”

Sadly enough, 17 years later, it turns out that the detention authority may be poised to outlive the use of force. Guantánamo has become an American institution at the cost of $13 million per prisoner annually. The system of offshore injustice has, by now, become part and parcel of the American system of justice — our very own “forever prison.”

The difficulty of closing Guantánamo has shown that once you move outside the laws and norms of this country in a significant way, the return to normalcy becomes ever more problematic — and the longer the exception, the harder such a restoration will be. Remember that, before his presidency was over, George W. Bush went on record acknowledging his preference for closing Guantánamo. Obama made it a goal of his presidency from the outset. Biden, with less fanfare and the lessons of their failures in mind, faces the challenge of finally closing America’s forever prison.

With all that in mind, let me offer you a positive twist on this seemingly never-ending situation. I won’t be surprised if, in fact, President Biden actually does manage to close Guantánamo. He may not do so as a result of the withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan, but because he seems to have a genuine urge to shut the books on the war on terror, or at least the chapter of it initiated on 9/11.

And if he were also to shut down that prison, in the spirit of that letter from the Democratic senators, it would be because of Guantánamo’s gross violations of American laws and norms. While the letter did not go so far as to name the larger war-on-terror sins of the past, it did at least draw attention directly to the wrongfulness of indefinite detention as a system created expressly to evade the law — and one that brought ill-repute to the United States globally.

That closure should certainly happen under President Biden. After all, any other course is not only legally unacceptable, but risks perpetuating the idea that this country continues to distrust the principles of law, human rights, and due process – indeed, the very fundamentals of a democratic system.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
April 18, 2021

24 Senators Urge Biden to Close Guantánamo Bay Prison

Echoing recent demands from human rights advocates and former detainees, two dozens members of the U.S. Senate Democratic Caucus on Friday pressed President Joe Biden to finally close the Guantánamo Bay offshore military prison, where 40 men are still being held despite global outrage over the facility and its long record of torture.

“As a symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses, the detention facility continues to harm U.S. national security by serving as a propaganda tool for America’s enemies and continues to hinder counterterrorism efforts and cooperation with allies,” declares the letter (pdf), spearheaded by Senate Majority Whip and Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) as well as Appropriations Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

“For nearly two decades, the offshore prison has damaged America’s reputation, fueled anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakened the United States’ ability to counter terrorism and fight for human rights and the rule of law around the world,” the letter continues. “In addition to the $540 million in wasted taxpayer dollars each year to maintain and operate the facility, the prison also comes at the price of justice for the victims of 9/11 and their families, who are still waiting for trials to begin.”

In February, National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said that “we are undertaking an NSC process to assess the current state of play that the Biden administration has inherited from the previous administration, in line with our broader goal of closing Guantánamo.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki subsequently confirmed that shuttering the prison permanently “certainly is our goal and our intention.”

Welcoming the White House’s review, the senators point out that all 40 Gitmo detainees are aging, many with complex health problems, and six have been approved for transfer for years, in some cases for over a decade.

“After years of indefinite detention without charge or trial; a history of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; and multiple attempts at a thoroughly failed and discredited military commission process, it is past time to close Guantánamo’s detention facility and end indefinite detention,” the lawmakers emphasize, adding that “with sufficient political will and swift action, your administration can finish the job.”

Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump, vowed to keep the prison open after his predecessor, former President Barack Obama — under whom Biden was vice president — failed to deliver on his vow to close it, despite eight years in office.

“Strong and effective leadership from the White House will be necessary,” the senators write, calling for a senior official specifically tasked with handling the closure.

Q: What damages US reputation, fuels anti-Muslim bigotry, and weakens US counterterrorism efforts worldwide? A: #Guantanamo, say 24 Democratic Senators demanding its closure. @SachaPfeiffer https://t.co/O4maoxjPyY

— Letta Tayler (@lettatayler) April 16, 2021

The lawmakers add that “because indefinite detention at Guantánamo is at its core a human rights problem — one that demands solutions rooted in diplomacy and that uphold U.S. human rights and humanitarian law obligations — the National Security Council’s human rights directorate should play a leading role in both the review you have ordered as well as throughout the closure process.”

They further demand that the president immediately re-establish the special envoy for Guantánamo closure at the State Department, rebuild related infrastructure at the Defense Department, and, as it relates to the remaining detainees, “make use of our federal court system in ways that are consistent with current law but that have been underutilized by previous administrations.”

“Given the current statutory prohibition on transfers to the United States,” the letter says, “we urge you to direct the Justice Department to explore pursuing plea agreements remotely, via video conference, with detainees for whom there are federal charges available and against whom the department has sufficient untainted evidence to bring such charges.”

“In the event that a detainee is sentenced to a period of incarceration beyond time already served at Guantánamo,” the letter continues, “your administration could negotiate with foreign governments to allow the remaining time to be completed in the transfer country subject to the terms of the plea agreement.”

The senators also call on Biden to “reverse erroneous and troubling legal positions taken by the Trump administration regarding the application of relevant international and domestic legal protections to Guantánamo, including in particular the position that the Constitution’s Due Process Clause does not apply to the men detained there.”

“After the unprecedented damage of the last four years to America’s standing in the world, closing the Guantánamo detention facility is more important than ever for sending a message about what we stand for as a nation,” the letter concluded. “We urge you to act swiftly to ensure that message is loud and clear.”

Along with Durbin and and Leahy, the letter’s signatories are Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
March 8, 2021

“Is This Who We Are?”: Gitmo is America’s Enduring Shame

“That’s certainly our goal and our intention.” This was the non-committal answer given by White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, when, on February 12, she was asked by a reporter whether the new Joe Biden Administration intends to shut down the notorious Guantánamo Bay Prison by the end of the president’s first term in office.

Psaki’s answer may have seemed reassuring, that the untold suffering experienced by hundreds of men in this American gulag – many of whom were surely innocent – would be finally coming to an end. However, considering the history of Guantánamo and the trail of broken promises by the Barack Obama Administration, the new administration’s pledge is hardly encouraging.

Compare the new language with that of Obama’s impassioned diatribes about humanity, justice and American values, which he utilized whenever he spoke of Guantánamo. “Gitmo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama said at a speech at the National Defense University in May 2013.

Enamored with his every word, Obama’s audience clapped with enthusiasm. When he delivered that particular speech, Obama was then serving his second term in office. He already had ample opportunity to shut down the prison which operated with no international monitoring and entirely outside the realms of international and US laws.

Obama is likely to be remembered for his words, not his actions. Not only did he fail to shut down the prison which was erected by his predecessor, George W. Bush, in 2002, but the Guantánamo industry continued to thrive during his terms. For example, in his speech, Obama made reference to the high cost of “a hundred and fifty million dollars each year to imprison 166 people.” According to the New Yorker, reporting in 2016, Guantánamo’s budget had morphed to “$445 million last year,” when Obama was still in office.

Yet, as the budget grew by leaps and bounds, the number of Guantánamo prisoners dwindled. Currently, there are only 40 prisoners still residing in that massive edifice of metal, concrete and barbed wire located at the eastern tip of Cuba, built atop a piece of land ‘leased’ by the US in 1903.

It is easy to conclude that the US government keeps the prison open only to avoid international accountability and, arguably, to extract information by torture, an act that is inconsistent with American laws. But this cannot be it. On the one hand, the entire wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal under international law. Such a fact hardly stopped the US and its allies from savagely invading, humiliating and torturing entire populations with no regard whatsoever to legal or moral arguments.

On the other hand, Guantánamo is merely one of many American-run prisons and detention centers throughout the world that operate with no manual of rules and according to the most ruthless tactics. The tragedy of Abu Ghraib, a US military detention center in Baghdad, only became famous when direct evidence of the degrading, and incredibly violent conduct that was taking place within its walls was produced and publicized.

In fact, many American officials and members of Congress at the time used the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004 as an opportunity to whitewash and rebrand American crimes elsewhere and to present the misconduct in this Iraqi prison as if an isolated incident involving “a few bad apples”.

The ‘few bad apples’ argument, made by G. W. Bush was, more or less, the same logic utilized by Obama when he championed the closure of Guantánamo. Indeed, both Presidents insisted that neither Abu Ghraib nor Guantánamo should be made out to represent what America is really all about.

“Is this who we are?” Obama animatedly and passionately asked, as he made a case in favor of the closure of Guantánamo, speaking as if a human rights advocate, not a Commander-in-Chief who had direct authority to shut down the entire facility. The truth is that the Abu Ghraib tortures were not ‘a few bad apples’ and Guantánamo is, indeed, a microcosm of exactly what the US is, or has become.

From Bagram, Afghanistan, to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the many ‘floating prisons’ – news of which was leaked by US media in 2014 – the US government continues to make a mockery of international and humanitarian laws. Many American officials, who genuinely advocate the closure of Guantánamo, refuse to acknowledge that the prison is a symbol of their country’s intransigence and refuse to accept that, like any other country in the world, it is accountable to international law.

This lack of accountability has exceeded the US government’s insistence to ‘act alone’, as in to launch wars without international mandates. One US Administration after another has also made it clear that, under no circumstances, would they allow accused war criminals to be investigated, let alone stand trial, before the International Criminal Court (ICC). The message here is that even America’s ‘bad apples’ can potentially walk free, regardless of the heinousness of their crimes.

Just months after the Trump Administration imposed sanctions on ICC judges to punish them for the potential investigations of US crimes in Afghanistan, it freed the convicted criminals who carried out horrific crimes in Iraq. On December 22, Trump pardoned four American mercenaries who belonged to the private military firm, Blackwater. These convicted murderers were involved in the killing of 14 civilians, including two children, in Baghdad in 2007.

What became known as the ‘Nisour Square massacre’ was another example of whitewashing, as government officials and mainstream media, though expressing outrage at the unlawful killing, insisted that the massacre was an isolated episode. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, were killed as a result of the American invasion seems irrelevant in the country’s skewed logic in its never-ending ‘war on terror’.

Whether Biden fulfills his promise of shutting down Guantánamo or not, little will change if the US remains committed to its condescending attitude towards international law and to its undeserved view of itself as a country that exists above the universal rights of everyone else.

That said, Guantánamo, on its own, is a crime against humanity and there can never be any justification to rationalize why hundreds of people are held indefinitely, without trial, without due process, without international observers and without ever seeing their families and loved ones. The explanation often offered by the pro-Guantánamo pundits is that the prison inmates are dangerous men. If that was, indeed, the case, why were these supposed criminals not allowed to see their day in court?

According to a report by Amnesty International published in May 2020, of the 779 men who were taken to that facility, “only seven have been convicted.” Worse, five of them were convicted “as a result of pre-trial agreements under which they pleaded guilty, in return for the possibility of release from the base.” According to the rights group, such a trial by ‘military commission’ “did not meet fair trial standards”.

In other words, Guantánamo is – and has always been – a fraudulent operation with no real inclination to holding criminals and terrorists accountable and to preventing further crimes. Instead, Guantánamo is an industry, and a lucrative one. In many ways, it is similar to the American prison military complex, ironically dubbed the ‘criminal justice system.’ Referring to the unjust ‘justice system’, Human Rights Watch derided the US for having “the largest reported prison population in the world”.

“The (US) criminal justice system – from policing and prosecution, through to punishment – is plagued with injustices like racial disparities, excessively harsh sentencing and drug and immigration policies that improperly emphasize criminalization,” HRW stated on its website.

The above, too, can be considered an answer to Obama’s rhetorical question, “Is this who we are?”. Yes, Mr. Obama, in fact, this is precisely who you are.

While offering the world’s most miserable detention conditions to hundreds of potentially innocent men, Guantánamo also offers career opportunities, high military perks and honors, and a seemingly endless budget for a small army to guard only a few shackled, gaunt-looking men in a far-away land.

So, even if Biden is able to overcome pressure from the military, from the CIA and from Congress to shut Guantánamo down, justice will still be absent, not only because of the numerous lives that are forever shattered but because America still refuses to learn from its mistakes.
The post “Is This Who We Are?”: Gitmo is America’s Enduring Shame first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
February 10, 2021

I’m on Hunger Strike in Guantánamo. I Dream of Cooking for My Family.

There are very few freedoms at Guantánamo Bay prison, where I have been held without charge or trial — referred to as Guantánamo ISN 1461 — for over 16 years. The right to starve myself is one of them, but even then, they force-feed me, to spare themselves the embarrassment of my death.

Back in Pakistan, before I was kidnapped and tortured and flown halfway around the world in chains, I loved cooking. There is nothing more satisfying than preparing a hot meal for your family and sharing it with them. Here, I am allowed to cook for my fellow prisoners, but only in a microwave, and the guards could take even that away at any time. I never eat the food myself. I have been on hunger strike for seven years in protest at my indefinite detention. When everything else has been taken from you, this small measure of self-determination means a lot.

This photograph shows Ahmed Rabbani in Karachi, Pakistan, before he was sold to the U.S. for a bounty in 2002. (Courtesy of Reprieve)
Courtesy of Ahmed Rabbani

I was abducted from my home on September 10, 2002, and sold to the U.S. for a bounty, with the false story that I was a terrorist called Hassan Ghul. As a result of that, I was taken to the Dark Prison in Kabul, and tortured for 540 days. I refused to say I was Hassan Ghul because I wasn’t. Eventually the U.S. captured Ghul, and because he was deemed “cooperative,” they let him go. He went back to his old ways, and was killed by a drone in 2012.

I was rendered to Guantánamo in September 2004. I tried to obey the prison’s foolish rules for a long time before I gave up. I began hunger striking in earnest in 2013 when my patience finally ran out. Twice a day, they strap me into their torture chair and force a 110-centimeter tube up my nose.

My lawyers have now created a website where, as I approach 3,000 days on strike, you can follow my gradual disappearance. I was 170 pounds when they first seized me, and I am now down to 80 pounds. This means that 53 percent of me has “escaped” from this prison. It can’t go on forever of course, and I hope that I don’t get shipped home in a coffin — but I have to do something to peacefully protest.

This would be hard enough for anyone, but for a man like me who loves to cook and eat, it is even worse. Can you begin to imagine the torture when I make meals for my brethren here, but do not eat myself?

All I have to sustain me are dreams. When I get out of here, I dream of opening a restaurant where I will cook only the most original food from our society, food that has existed for centuries. I will give you one example which perhaps you would like to try.

I call it a “Rabbani” as it is my own take on an ancient tradition: I am ethnically Rohingya, but I am a Pakistani citizen and lived for many years in Saudi Arabia. The name of a similar dish among Arabs is “harisa” or “hareesa” and it is very spicy. My wife used to make it the Pakistani way: it is called “haleem” and has lentils with less spice. My innovation was to blend the cultures, using the spice of Arabia and the lentil flavor of Pakistan.

I hope that I don’t get shipped home in a coffin — but I have to do something to peacefully protest.

Take whole wheat and soak it all night, with half as much weight in lentils. The next morning boil the wheat and lentils together in water for at least one hour, adding some spices — whole spices, not powder — plenty of cinnamon, cardamom and cloves.

Meanwhile, fry some onion — cut very thin — in oil to begin with, but I generally add butter or organic ghee as they soften. Then add pepper and ginger.

Now the meat. Lamb was my favorite, with a bit of fat. It should have been boiled beforehand until tender.

Then mix everything for many minutes. It must be done by hand with a spoon, over the fire — never use a machine for this. Adding a little milk will lighten the color.

Here at Guantánamo, I don’t have the ingredients for a Rabbani, so when I cook for the other men, I must make do with lentils. Last night I soaked some so that they would be ready after my call with my lawyer. One day, when I go back to my wife and family in Karachi, I hope to be able to make the dish properly once again.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.