Gitmo Horror Part II
Last week I wrote about the first person accounts of torture and other inhumane treatment in Guantanamo contained in a report(pdf) by the Center for Constitutional Rights. More information is coming to light and it squares with what the three freed British citizens said.
First, it's quite clear that prisoners are routinely beaten and abused when captured in Afghanistan. Often these prisoners have been sold by various tribes and factions (reportedly for $5,000) to US forces. From that point on, these prisoners are considered terrorists with no human rights. The prisoners who are then sent to Guantanamo are subjected to harsh mental torture, much of it specifically tailored to each prisoner by way of psychiatric medical evaluations. There is evidence that this mental torture results in more false confessions than any useable intelligence. In fact, some people allege that there has been next to no useable intelligence drawn from the prisoners in Gitmo. Instead, according to the three Britons, it seems to have become something of a training camp for new interrogators who use the prisoners there to practice their craft. An article called "Guantanamo Bay on Trial" in the January edition of Vanity Fair (no link) bears these claims out.
"...from a military standpoint, intelligence officials with extensive experience in counterterrorism claim that Gitmo's intelligence value is relatively low, and much of the information obtained there unreliable. Vanity Fair has established that none of the al-Qaeda leaders captured since September 11, 2001, has ever been held at GuantAnamo Bay. Sixty-four detainees innocent of any terrorist connection have already been released, and officials admit there may be many more to come. The method of interrogation now in use at Gitmo-a formal system of escalating bribes in return for confessions-is almost certain to produce bogus testimony, experts say, and the camp's interrogators are mostly young and inexperienced.
[...]
General Miller makes it clear that he does not have access to staff of this caliber. Seven out of 10 of the interrogators working in his "joint interrogation group" are reservists, and they come to Camp Delta straight from a 25-day course at Fort Huachuca. "They're all young people, but they're really committed to winning the mission," Miller says. "Intelligence is a young person's game-you've got to be flexible."
Some seasoned intelligence officials disagree. "Generally, the new hires apprentice in the booths with more experienced guys," says one. "I certainly know of no one at Gitmo having the opportunity or the luxury to be able to prepare an interview for three months." Another had met some of Miller's interrogators. "They were rookies, and none were too keen on the process down there," he says. They knew that any seemingly insignificant tidbit might later turn out to be important, but in general "they just didn't feel that the process was going anywhere fast.
This article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer reveals the details of yet another prisoner's experience in Guantanamo from papers recently unsealed by a Seattle Federal Court:
Recently declassified documents in a Seattle federal court describe the extreme isolation of an alleged al-Qaida member at a U.S. military prison that experts say constitutes torture and war crimes.
The documents, unsealed yesterday at the request of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others, include U.S. Navy lawyer Charles Swift's firsthand observation at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison of the conditions of solitary confinement of his client, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year-old Yemeni who acknowledges chauffeuring Osama bin Laden at his Afghan farm.
The court documents describing the alleged mistreatment of Hamdan are part of a lawsuit challenging his detention, the conditions of detention and his prolonged isolation in solitary confinement.
[...]
In 2001, as U.S. forces were fighting in Afghanistan, Hamdan says Afghan fighters captured him, hogtied him with electrical wire and sold him to American forces for $5,000. Once in U.S. custody, Hamdan maintains that American officials in Afghanistan:
Beat him with fists and feet.
Forced him to sit motionless on benches for days.
Dressed him only in overalls in subfreezing temperatures.
Showed him a gun and threaten him with death, torture and imprisonment.
After six months, he was flown to Guantanamo. There, his life got worse.
Hamdan told Lt. Cmdr. Swift that the eight months of solitary confinement at Guantanamo "was worse than anything he had experienced in Afghanistan ... and that he was going crazy."
"I have not been permitted to see the sun or hear other people outside .... or talk with other people. I am alone except for a guard," Hamdan said last February in a court affidavit that was first sealed, then made classified in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle.
"One month is like a year here, and I have considered pleading guilty in order to get out of here," Hamdan said after two months in solitary.
Now -- six months later -- even the guard is gone. A video camera mounted on a wall now monitors Hamdan, according to Swift's statement.
Experts on torture and international law said yesterday that -- if true -- the death threats and solitary confinement described in court documents constitute war crimes, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. They say the allegations also represent violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture as well as U.S. law.
And several international legal scholars said that criminal responsibility is not limited to those who committed the torture and can implicate the entire chain of command up to the president of the United States if they knew or should have known about the violations.
The stories coming out of Gitmo are remarkably consistent. This is not an unusual case. Indeed, the attempted suicide rate down there is astronomical, but after this was publicized, in a typical Bushian move, they have decided to simply give attempted suicidee another, less disturbing, name. From the Vanity Fair article:
In the camp's acute ward, a young man lies chained to his bed, being fed protein-and-vitamin mush through a stomach tube inserted via a nostril. "He's refused to eat 148 consecutive meals," says Dr. Louis Louk, a naval surgeon from Florida. "In my opinion, he's a spoiled brat, like a small child who stomps his feet when he doesn't get his way." Why is he shackled? "I don't want any of my guys to be assaulted or hurt," he says.
By the end of September 2003, the official number of suicide attempts by inmates was 32, but the rate has declined recently-not because the detainees have stopped trying to hang themselves but because their attempts have been reclassified. Gitmo has apparently spawned numerous cases of a rare condition: "manipulative self-injurious behavior," or S.I.B. That, says chief surgeon Captain Stephen Edmondson, means "the individual's state of mind is such that they did not sincerely want to end their own life." Instead, they supposedly thought they could get better treatment, perhaps even obtain release. In the last six months, there have been 40 such incidents.
Daryl Matthews, professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Hawaii, was asked by the Pentagon to spend a week at GuantAnamo investigating detainees' mental health and the treatments available. Unlike reporters-who must agree in writing not to speak to prisoners-Professor Matthews spoke with the inmates for many hours.
Manipulative self-injurious behavior "is not a psychiatric classification," he says, and the Pentagon should not be using it. "It is dangerous to try to divide 'serious' attempts at suicide from mere gestures, and a psychiatrist needs to make a proper diagnosis in each and every case." At Gitmo, Dr. Matthews says, the "huge cultural gulf" between camp staff and prisoners makes this difficult, if not impossible.
There is a lot of evidence in the three Briton's testimony that this is a huge problem. Being English, they were much more able to deal with guards and interrogators and yet they were driven to a false confessions. But,in addition to the torture, there is a huge shortage of adequate translators and many different languages being spoken (Apparently, there has even been a contingent of Chinese from the northern border who were handed over to the Chinese government, their fate unknown. One can only imagine.) Many of these guys are living an isolated, Kafkaesque nightmare.
Here's the nut. Prisoners in Guantanamo were taken into custody under extremely questionable circumstances and assumed to be terrorists with no further recourse. This was done (again via VF) because:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Gitmo plays not one but three vital roles in what the Pentagon calls the gwot, or global war on terror. First, it keeps terrorists "off the streets," until death if necessary. Second, it turns them into sources of intelligence. Finally, with the first special "military commission" tribunals set to begin at Gitmo early in 2004, it lets America bring the perpetrators of terrible crimes to justice-in accordance, says Rumsfeld, "with the traditions of fairness and justice under law, on which this nation was founded, the very principles that the terrorists seek to attack and destroy."
We know that in the first case, many of these people were not terrorists yet they are being subjected to horrifyingly inhumane treatment indefinitely. The three Britons being the ones most able to tell their stories to westerners, confirm this. There have been more than 60 others released back to their home countries after having been through this. We don't know how many more are still inside.
In the second case, there has been little intelligence value in their interogations, not just because they aren't actually terrorists, but because even if they were, they've been out of the loop now for years. In fact, we know that there have been no high value terrorists ever held in Guantanamo. They are being water-boarded at discreet facilities elsewhere in the gulag.
In the third case, these sham military tribunals, the nature of which military lawyers themselves are appalled at, really mean that hundreds of innocent men are going to spend the rest of their lives in prison and for the forseeable future undergo mental torture that can only be described as criminal. At the least, the administration is intent upon dragging its feet for years, if necessary, to keep them from ever seeing the light of a real courtroom.
I don't know what the Kerry admnistration will do about this, but I think it's fair to say that they are going to be under tremendous pressure to appear "tough" on terrorism by the enraged firebreathers on the right who are already gearing up to engage in their own special form of political torture should they lose. Counter pressure is going to be needed.