Amnesty said
that Guantanamo is
the 'new Gulag'. Bush replied that in
the future the occupation of Iraq would be
seen as the US's "golden
moment" even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004.
The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties.
"The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal".
Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous
three years, beyond the reach
of American and European
judicial process, immediately
began to pick up the slack.
process
explicit last week when the
Pentagon announced that half
of the 540 or so inmates at
Guantánamo: are to bè transferred in
Afghanistan Saudi
Arabia....
"Bagram air force base. The
CIA has one facility
Bagram and another, known
as the 'Salt Pit', in an abandoned brick factory north of
Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and
other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment." (One Huge US Jail, Guardian, Saturday March 19, 2005). 'Rendering suspects for torture
One of the most sinister aspects of the worldwide system of torture and secret detention is the rendering' of suspects to their countries of origin, or third-party states, where they will be tortured. The CIA, using a front company, operates a Gulfstream jet which moves detainees around to different US facilities, or 'renders' them for torture to other states.
One of many examples is
the following case described
by Levy and Scott-Clark of
tWo Egyptian
Sweden, "rendered' back to
their home country •at the
request 'of the US: "On
December 18 2001, Agiza and
a second Egyptian refugee,
Mohammed Al-Zery, had
arrested by Swedish
intelligence acting upon
request from the US
They were driven, shackled
and blindfolded,
Stockholm's Bromma airt,
where they were cuffed and
cut from their clothes.
Suppositories were inserted
into both men's anuses, they were wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.
Both men were subsequently tortured. Mohammed Zarai, former director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor clean." Amnesty slams
Bush
George Bush at the end of May denounced the new
Amnesty International report
and beyond:
The continuing pursuit of
unchecked executive power)
as absurd.
said that
Guantanamo the 'new
Gulag'. Bush replied that in
the future the occupation of
Iraq would be seen as the US's
"golden moment".
The tone and language of
the Amnesty report is almost
unprecedented. Despite ItS
unpopularity with repressive
governments, Amnesty
guards its political neutrality
and respectability jealouslyindeed these things are precondition for it being able to
covernBut O]1 i occasion, Bush, accusing him of once again failing to address the issues
Amnesty says:
"Guantánamo is only the visible part of the story. Evidence continues to mount that the US operates a network of detention centres where people are held in secret or outside any proper legal framework from Afghanistan to and beyond."
"US interrogation and The CIA, using a
front company, operates a Gulfstream jet
which moves
detainees
around to
different US
facilities, or 'renders' them
for torture to
other states. detention policies and practices during : the Del On terror, have deliberately and systematically breached the absolute prohibition of torture and ill-treatment. Individuals held in US custody have been transferred for interrogation countries known to practice torture.
«If President Bush and his administration are senou about freedom and human dignity they should recommit to the rule of law and human rights."
The indefatigable British
commentator Robert Fisk delivered a searing indictment of the whole enterprise in another brilliant article (America's shame, two • years on from Mission Accomplished', Independent, 8
May 2005).
"Two years after "Mission
Accomplished", whatever
moral stature the United
States could claim at the end
of its invasion of Iraq has long
ago been squandered in the
torture and abuse and deaths
at Abu Ghraib.
That the symbol of Saddam
Hussein's brutality should
have been turned by his own
enemies into the symbol of
their own brutality is a singularly ironic epitaph for the
whole Irag adventure.
We have all been contaminated by the cruelty of the
interrogators and the guards
and prison commanders.
"How did this culture of
filth start in America's "war
on terror"? The institutionalised injustice which we have witnessed across the world, the vile American "renditions" in which prisoners are freighted to countries where they can be roasted, electrified or, in Uzbekistan, cooked alive in fat?
As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times, what seemed mind-boggling when the first pictures emerged from Abu Ghraib is now routine, typical of the abuse that has permeated the Bush administration's operations
"With an insurgency growing ever more vicious and uncontrollable, the emptiness of Mr Bush's silly boast is plain.
The real mission, it seems,
was to institutionalise the cruelty of Western armies, staining us forever with the
depravity of Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo and Bagram -not to mention the secret prisons which even the Red Cross
cannot visit and wherein who
knows what vileness is conducted. What, I wonder, is our
next "mission'?"
• A note on sources: Some
of the articles quoted in this
article are linked to at Irag
Occupation Watch
http://www.occupationwatch.org/. Amnesty
International's full report
and reply to Bush can be
found at its website. The
Human Rights First report
on secret detentions is at
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/index.html, together
with a March 2005 update
"Behind the Wire'.