Focus on Cuban camp obscured far worse activities around the world. By Clive Stafford Smith
January 10, 2006
For four years Guantánamo’s high profile obscured a far shadier
world of US-sponsored interrogation chambers around the world, writes Clive Stafford Smith.
Only now is the world finally asking about the archipelago of US
prisons around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying
prisoners from one torture chamber to the next.
The
Guantánamo Bay welcome sign trumpets the base motto: 'Honor Bound to
Defend Freedom.’ Outside the base, on a visit to see my clients held in
the prison, I watched a soldier smartly salute his superior: 'Honor
Bound, sir!’ The officer saluted his reply: 'To Defend Freedom,
soldier!’ I laughed. I thought they were joking.
The joke is on
us. Guantánamo has been a decoy, drawing attention from a far shadier
world of US-sponsored interrogation chambers. For four years, the
stratagem worked quite effectively. The Bush administration blustered
in response to global anger at the 'secret' Guantánamo prison.
Only
now is the world finally asking about the archipelago of US prisons
around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying prisoners from
one torture chamber to the next.
Among his other sins, US
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is an amateur philosopher. He has
opined upon 'The Unknown’: "As we know, 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."
So let us assess: What do we know about the secret prisons of the US, and what is yet to surface?
First,
who is being held and where? Rumsfeld announced that the Guantánamo
prisoners were the 'worst of the worst’, carefully culled from
thousands captured on the Afghan battlefield; some were top al Qaida
leaders and the rest were 'amongst the most dangerous, best-trained,
vicious killers on the face of the earth’. All were 'involved in an
effort to kill thousands of Americans’.
This is the first
falsehood. We know the names of several important prisoners seized by
the US in its War on Terror. The capture of at least eleven of Osama
bin Laden's top generals has been advertised in the media: Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, Abdul Rahim
al-Sharqawi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohammed Omar
Abdel-Rahman, Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, Hassan Ghul, Ahmed Khalfan
Ghailani, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi.
We know that none of these big
names is in Guantánamo. To be sure, there used to be a secret part of
Guantánamo, and perhaps Abu Zubaydah and others were held there
briefly. But this detention centre was closed in the summer of 2004,
when the Supreme Court ruled that the writ of habeas corpus should be
available to prisoners in Guantánamo. The rule of law had come
disturbingly close to the Al Qaida generals, and they had to be moved
out of its reach.
We also know that Guantánamo does not even
house the second tier of terrorists. The military has published the
names of the 'worst' Guantánamo prisoners, the nine (out of 500) who
have been 'charged' in a military commission.
Top of the list
is a Yemeni prisoner, Salim Hamdan, who the military says was Osama bin
Laden's driver. Cast aside the fact that he denies the charge and let
us assume his guilt. Cast aside the fact that 30 other people have also
been identified as bin Laden's drivers; bin Laden apparently had many
cars. What does it mean that the ultimately worst enemy of the US
available in Guantánamo is a chauffeur?
Indeed, we know that a
large proportion of the Guantánamo prisoners are not terrorists at all.
A CIA officer has said that half the prisoners had nothing to do with
any crime and the rest were, at most, footsoldiers.
Rumsfeld
lied when he said the prisoners were captured on the Afghan
battlefield. Two of my clients, Bisher al Rawi and Jamil el Banna, both
British residents, were grabbed in the Gambia – further from Kabul than
their homes in London. The majority of prisoners I represent were not
seized in Afghanistan at all, but purchased in Pakistan for the
bounties offered by the US – starting at US$5,000, 20 years' salary for
many locals.
If Guantánamo houses no major member of al Qaida,
two questions remain: first, how many 'ghost' prisoners are there?
Second, where are these prisoners held?
Desperate families
The
US has publicly acknowledged rendering 150 prisoners from one country
to another to secret prisons. With as many as 80,000 prisoners passing
through US hands in the four years post-9/11, and with scores of
desperate families searching for their lost ones, it seems likely that
the total number of the 'disappeared’ is much higher. The US$64,000
question – and we know we don’t know the answer here – is what, when
they have been shuttled from one secret prison to the next for a few
years, the US plans to do with these prisoners.
As to the
second question: word has gradually seeped out about an archipelago of
secret US prisons. At one point, there were 20 US-sponsored detention
centres in Afghanistan. Torture indubitably took place there, but those
prisons are now under Afghan rather than US control because President
Harmid Karzai cannot afford to play the puppet to President Bush any
longer. Neither are these Afghan prisons secure: the US says that a
number of significant prisoners escaped on 11 July, 2005.
The US
turned to its allies in Europe for assistance in rendering prisoners,
and holding them incommunicado without any legal rights – a clear
violation of international law. Surprisingly, Germany comes top of the
league table of shame, hosting more CIA planes (437) on their rendition
missions than any other country.
Among others, Waleed bin
Attash was allegedly held and interrogated in a US base on German soil,
as one of my clients – his brother, who is held in Guantanamo Bay – has
informed me. CIA planes have visited Britain at least 210 times, and in
December, the BBC reported that some interrogations actually took place
on British soil.
The 'New European’ nations of Poland and
Romania have, according to persistent reports, been even more
receptive, hosting secret lawless enclaves for the CIA. But there are
too many inquisitive journalists in Europe, which means that there are
unlikely to be many secret US prisons in Europe in the longer term.
Meanwhile,
there are truths yet to emerge: the German media has reported that Camp
Bondsteel in Kosovo is one place that has been held. The huge US
airbases in Germany may not have given up their prisoners yet either.
Yet
another December leak, to ABC news, revealed that the 11 named Al Qaida
generals have already been moved from Eastern Europe to 'a new CIA
facility in the North African desert’. Where might this be in the
rendition merry-go-round? There are various repressive Middle Eastern
governments who have blindly done the US bidding these past four years.
For example, before he got to Guantánamo, the CIA took my
client Binyam Mohammed, a British resident who lived in Kensington, to
Morocco on July 21 2002. During the ensuing 18 months, he had a razor
blade repeatedly taken to his penis. Naturally, he said whatever they
wanted to hear, but at one point he did ask his abusers why they were
doing this.
'America's really pissed off at what happened,’ a
guard replied. 'And they've said to the world, either you're with us or
you're against us. We Moroccans say we're with [the US]. So we'll do
whatever they want. They want revenge for everyone who died on 9/11.’
Unconfirmed
reports suggest that Morocco may be the current residence of the Al
Qaida generals. Indeed, it is quite an ally who will razor-blade
prisoners for a friend. But Morocco is not a reliable long-term
torturer. The King has been trying to clean up Morocco's international
image of late, and when Binyam inevitably sues the King and his
colleagues under the Torture Convention, they will probably rethink
their position.
The Syrians have worked with (or on) prisoners
rendered by the CIA. For example, Maher Arar, a Canadian, was stopped
in transit in JFK airport in New York, and rendered to Syria where he
spent 10 months in a tiny isolation cell called 'The Grave’,
intermittently beaten with frayed cables. Yet Syria can hardly be
considered the ideal partners in crime, as President Bush periodically
threatens to invade them.
Egypt has been useful in the past,
but has irritatingly independent journalists, and is experiencing a
troubling tendency toward democracy and openness. Several prisoners
have been rendered there for torture, including Mamduh Habib, who went
through their electric shock programme. But Egypt may be unwilling to
house a fully-fledged CIA prison.
Juveniles in detention
Jordan
was nominated by the Los Angeles Times 'as a hub for extraordinary
renditions’, and has been a close collaborator. Sadly, the US is
attracted by the repressive nature of its government, but the CIA is
likely to be deterred by the sieve-like quality of its prisons.
One
of our Guantánamo clients was first rendered to Jordan as a juvenile
for 16 months of torture. He persuaded a guard to take a message to his
family; the guard later accepted a bribe for other services rendered.
The problem, from the CIA perspective, is that too many Arabs in the
Middle East are sympathetic to the CIA's Arab prisoners – in the wake
of Abu Ghraib, about 99 per cent of them.
Parts of Israel might
qualify loosely as the 'North African desert’. Reports suggest that the
CIA is reportedly building two new prisons there, one near Galilee, and
one in the Negev. While the US has no closer (or better compensated)
friend, the Israelis would be very unwise to allow their territory to
be used for the kinds of techniques practiced by their amateurish US
allies.
As a sane Israeli intelligence officer said of Abu
Ghraib, the Israelis would not treat an Arab that way; Israelis know
they have to live in the region and the victims of this senseless
humiliation will remember it for a millennium. While Israel is a
possible short-term destination for prisoners – given the marriage
between the paranoid rump of Likud and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz
Axis of Insanity – the CIA will ultimately not get away with holding
its torture sessions there.
Inevitably, as it tries to hide its
illegal practices, the CIA will be driven ever farther afield. Thailand
reportedly hosted a CIA prison but it was closed in 2003. Perhaps most
likely is Diego Garcia, the British protectorate 1,000 miles from
anywhere in the Indian Ocean. Just as it does not take a genius to
identify the criminal methods of al-Qaida, so the Bush administration’s
response is also rather predictable: look for a hitherto unheard-of
military base on a far-flung island with little chance that pesky
lawyers will intervene. Sound familiar?
Of course, the UK
government has issued a stern denial about Diego Garcia: 'The US
authorities have repeatedly assured us that assertions in the press
that there are, or ever have been suspected terrorists under
interrogation on Diego Garcia, or on any of the vessels in BIOT
(British Indian Ocean Territories) or territorial waters are unfounded.
The British representative on Diego Garcia has confirmed this to be the
case.’
But should we believe these see-no-evil disclaimers? The
Polish government has insisted that the CIA did not use Polish
territory; the question is whether anyone believes them. The Germans
assure us that there must be an innocent explanation for the hundreds
of CIA flights in and out of Germany. Perhaps the tooth fairy really
will visit children this year.
Sadly, one thing we do know is
that the era of the US torture chamber is not over. President Bush has
piously denied that the US would ever torture people. Inconveniently,
at the moment he was saying this, vice-president 'Cheney showed up at a
Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption
to an amendment by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture
and inhumane treatment of prisoners’.
One has to ask why the
CIA needs an exception to the torture ban. Even though Bush recently
reached agreement with McCain on his torture ban, Bush’s staff are
still pressing to exclude all prisoners held on foreign soil from US
legal jurisdiction – in other words, the McCain Amendment, the Army
Field Manual and the CIA interrogation manual may all forbid US
personnel from torturing you, but once you have been tortured, you have
no court that will listen; nowhere to complain.
Whether or not
there is a US court of law that pays attention to torture, there will
always be the court of public opinion. To return to Rumsfeldian
philosophy, when it comes to secret prisons, there are various things
we know we don't yet know, but there is probably little we don't know
we don't know. The CIA can run but, in the long term, they just can't
hide.
The coalition of lawyers representing the Guantanamo
detainees and others, who vigorously object to the US taking part in
torture, have access to the CIA flight records, reflecting several
thousand trips taken by the CIA aircraft. As the victims of this
shameful treatment emerge from the secret prisons, we can compare their
accounts to the flight logs. In the meantime, thanks to the work of
investigative journalists, we have plenty of clues as to where the
CIA's criminal activity is taking place.
Meanwhile, back in
Guantánamo, a soldier saluted the military defense lawyer representing
Salim Hamdan: 'Honor Bound, sir!’ My colleague saluted back
sardonically, 'To defend the US Constitution.’ Guantánamo, along with
the Bush administration, should consider a change of motto.
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