Guantánamo Bay, Bagram & Beyond: Lies, Damned Lies & Torture Chambers

Clive Stafford Smith tries to make sense of the rendition merry-go-round.

It all begins with the Guantánamo Bay welcome sign trumpeting the Base motto: “Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.” On one visit to see my clients in Guantánamo, outside the base McDonalds, 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 is a decoy -- sometimes ironic, more often tragic -- drawing attention from an even more shadowy world of U.S.-sponsored interrogation chambers.

Among his various crimes, U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is an amateur poet and philosopher. He has penned a ‘poem’ called 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 America’s secret prisons, and what is yet to surface?

In the early days of Guantánamo, President George W. Bush was asked whether the prisoners would be treated fairly, with proper trials. Bush dismissed the scepticism, replying, “[t]he only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people.” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that the prisoners were the “worst of the worst,” carefully culled from thousands captured on the Afghan battlefield; some were top Al Qaeda 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.”

First, we know the names of several important prisoners seized by the U.S. 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.

Next, we know that none of these big names is in Guantánamo. To be sure, there used to be a secret part of Guantánamo that housed some such prisoners – perhaps Abu Zubaydah was among them. But this prison was closed in the summer of 2004, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the writ of habeas corpus should be available to prisoners in Guantánamo. The rule of law had come disturbingly close, and they had to be moved along.

We know that Guantánamo does not even house the second tier of terrorists. The military has published the names of the who have been identified as the ‘worst’ among the ‘worst of the worst’. These are the only nine (out of 500) to have been ‘charged’ in a military commission. Top of the list is a Yemeni prisoner, Salim Hamdan, touted as Osama bin Laden’s ‘chauffeur.’ Cast aside the fact that he denies the charges – let us assume his guilt.Cast aside the fact that thirty other people have also been identified as bin Laden’s chauffeurs -- bin Laden apparently had many cars. What does it mean that the ‘baddest’ enemy available in Guantánamo is a chauffeur?

November 20th was the sixtieth anniversary of the Nuremburg tribunals. What would the world have thought if we’d decided not to try Herman Goering, while we hanged one of Adolph Hitler’s drivers?

A large proportion of the Guantánamo prisoners are not terrorists at all. We know that Rumsfeld fibbed when he said the prisoners were captured on the Afghan battlefield. Two of my clients were grabbed in the Gambia – rather further from Kabul than their homes in London. The overwhelming majority were not seized in Afghanistan at all, but purchased in Pakistan for the bounties offered by the U.S. – starting at $5,000, which is twenty years’ salary for many locals.

A CIA officer has said that half of the prisoners had nothing to do with any crime, and the rest were, at most, footsoldiers. When the prosecution says that half of my clients are innocent, I tend to assume the figure is rather higher.

If neither Al Qaeda’s eleven generals nor its many lieutenants are in Guantánamo, where are they? How many ghost prisoners are we talking about? Word has gradually seeped out about an archipelago of secret American prisons. At one point, there were twenty U.S. sponsored detention centres in Afghanistan. A depressing degree of torture took place in the Dark Prison in Kabul, at Bagram Airforce Base and beyond. But those prisons are closing down. President Harmid Karzai cannot afford to play the puppet to President Bush any longer, and the prisons are no longer secure. A number of significant prisoners apparently escaped on July 11, 2005.

While there are still several thousand prisoners in Iraq, this is not a serious option for secret interrogations. It is far too unstable, and there is the niggling distraction of the Geneva Conventions.

We now know that the ‘New Europe’ nations of Poland and Romania opened their Soviet-era gulags to the CIA. Condolezza Rice’s arrogant assertion that the Europeans should back off has ensured that angry European politicians and journalists will be swarming for Bush’s entire second term. There will be few secret U.S. prisons in Europe in the months to come. Indeed, yet another leak has revealed that the Al Qaeda generals already have been moved to “a new CIA facility in the North African desert”.

Where, in the rendition merry-go-round, might this be? There are various repressive Middle Eastern governments who have blindly done the U.S. bidding these past four years.For example, before he got to Guantánamo, my client Binyam Mohammed was taken to Morocco on a CIA flight on July 21, 2002.In the following eighteen 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,” they replied. “And they’ve said to the World, either you’re with us or you’re against us. We Moroccans say we’re with you. So we’ll do whatever they want. They want revenge for everyone who died on 9/11.”

It is quite some ally who will razor blade prisoners without dissent, but Morocco is not a reliable torturer. The King has been trying to clean up Morocco’s international image of late, and when the inevitable Torture Convention lawsuit comes in Binyam’s case, they will probably rethink their position.

Syria has worked with (or on) prisoners rendered by the CIA, but can hardly be considered the ideal partner in crime when President Bush periodically threatens to invade them. Egypt has been useful in the past, but is experiencing a troubling tendency towards democracy.

Perhaps Jordan -- referred to “as a hub for extraordinary renditions” -- is the most likely collaborator in the months to come. Sadly, the Americans are attracted to Jordan by the repressive nature of its government -- I know a little about this, since I was briefly taken in by the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) in 2004 when I was seeking out the families of Guantánamo prisoners.But the CIA will be deterred by the sieve-like quality of the GID prisons. One Muslim rendered there by the U.S. bribed a guard to take a message to his family; the guard later accepted a larger bribe to provide even more assistance. The problem, from the perspective of the CIA, is that too many Arabs in the Middle East are sympathetic with the CIA’s Arab prisoners -- about 99.9 percent of them, in fact.

The CIA is therefore being driven further afield, to other known unknowns. Thailand and other even less democratic allies in the Far East continue to be attractive options, simply because few journalists are onto them. Then there is Israel. The CIA is reportedly building two new prisons there, one near Gallilee, and one in the Negev desert. While the U.S. has no closer (or better compensated) friend, it seems improbable that the Israelis would allow their territory to be used for the kinds of techniques practiced by their amateurish American allies.As a sane Israeli intelligence officer said of Abu Ghraib, the Israelis would not humiliate an Arab that way – they know they have to live in the region for the millennium it would take for the hatred to dissipate. But when the paranoia of Likud is married to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Axis of Insanity, Israel cannot be ruled out.

Finally, there is Diego Garcia, the British naval base a thousand miles from anywhere in the Indian Ocean. Just as it does not take a genius to predict the criminal methods of Al Qaeda, so the Bush Administration is rather predictable as well: 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 British government has issued stern denials: “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.”

The Poles insist that nobody has used their territory. The Germans assure us that those 800 CIA flights in and out of Germany must be a mistake. And the Danish government assures us that Santa Claus is not in Greenland with his elves.

Sadly, one thing we know we know is that the era of the U.S. torture chamber is not over. President Bush has vigorously denied that the U.S. would ever torture people. Yet these quotations go into our ‘pious but implausible’ collection. Even while Bush was uttering them, inconveniently, Vice-President “Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners." The cynic must wonder whether an exception to a ban would be necessary if the U.S. were not indulging in torture.

It is hard for the culprits to escape. Because we have the CIA flight records, we know of roughly 30,000 trips taken by the CIA aircraft. Gradually, as the victims emerge from the secret prisons, we can match their misery with the flight logs. In the meantime, we have plenty of clues as to where their criminal activity is festering.

So we know that the crimes are happening. We know that they are being hidden. We probably know that we don’t know where they all are. But there is probably nothing we don’t know that we don’t know about it, sad to say.

Al Qaeda means ‘The Base’ in Arabic. Meanwhile, back at the Guantánamo Naval Base, I saw a soldier salute a ranking military defense lawyer representing one of the prisoners: “Honor Bound, sir!” My colleague saluted back sardonically, “To defend the U.S. Constitution.” Perhaps Guantánamo should consider a change of motto.