Guantánamo has been a decoy -- sometimes ironic, more often tragic -- drawing attention from a far more shady world of U.S.-sponsored interrogation chambers.
The Guantánamo Bay welcome sign that trumpets the Base motto:“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.”Outside the base McDonalds, 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 U.S.-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 American prisons around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying prisoners from one torture chamber to the next.
Among his other sins, U.S. 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 America’s secret prisons, 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 U.S. in its War on Terror.The capture of at least eleven of Usama 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 was 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.
Importantly, we 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 – let us assume his guilt.Cast aside the fact that thirty other people have also been identified as bin Laden’s drivers -- bin Laden apparently had many cars.What does it mean that the ‘baddest’ enemy of the United States 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 of the prisoners had nothing to do with any crime and the rest were, at most, footsoldiers. Rumsfeld fibbed when he said the prisoners were captured on the Afghan battlefield.Two of my clients were grabbed in the Gambia – further from Kabul than their homes in London.The majority of prisoners 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.
If Guantánamo houses no major member of al Qaida, two questions remain:First, how many ‘ghost’ prisoners are there?Scores of prisoners have gone missing around the world, and the U.S. has publicly acknowledged rendering 150 prisoners from one country to another.With as many as 80,000 prisoners passing through U.S. hands in the four years post-9/11, it seems likely that the total number is much higher.
Second, where are these prisoners held?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. Torture indubitably took place there, but those prisons are now under Afghan rather than U.S. control, because President Harmid Karzai cannot afford to play the puppet to President Bush any longer.Neither are these Afghan prisons secure:The U.S. says that a number of significant prisoners escaped on July 11, 2005.
The Americans turned to their 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.Amongst others, Waleed bin Attash was allegedly held and interrogated in a U.S. base on German soil.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 Europe’ nations of Poland and Romania have been even more receptive, opening their Soviet-era gulags to the CIA.But Condolezza Rice’s arrogant assertion that the Europeans should back off has energized a corps of angry journalists.While there are plenty of truths yet to emerge, there are unlikely to be many secret U.S. prisons in Europe in the months to come.
So the CIA had to move on.Yet another December leak, to ABC news, revealed that the eleven named Al Qaida generals already have 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 U.S. bidding these past four years.For example, before he got to Guantánamo, the CIA took my client Binyam Mohammed to Morocco on July 21, 2002.During the ensuing 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,” 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 you.So we’ll do whatever they want.They want revenge for everyone who died on 9/11.”
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, but 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 towards democracy and openness.
Jordan was nominated by the L.A. Times “as a hub for extraordinary renditions”, and has been a close collaborator.Sadly, the Americans are attracted by the repressive nature of its government, but the CIA is likely to be deterred by the sieve-like quality of its main prison.One of our clients in Guantánamo 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 with the CIA’s Arab prisoners – in the wake of Abu Ghraib, about 99 percent of them.
Parts of Israel might qualify loosely as the “North African desert”.The CIA is reportedly building two new prisons there, one near Gallilee, and one in the Negev.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 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.
The CIA will be driven ever farther afield.Thailand reportedly hosted a CIA prison, but it was closed in 2003.Perhaps most appealing is Diego Garcia, the British protectorate a thousand 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 response 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 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; it seems that they were not telling the truth.The Germans assure us that there must be an innocent explanation for the hundreds of CIA flights in and out of Germany.Perhaps Santa Claus really will visit the children this year.
Sadly, we know that the era of the U.S. torture chamber is not over.President Bush has piously denied that the U.S. 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 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners.”One has to ask: Why does the CIA need an exception to the torture ban?
To return to the Rumsfeld philosophy, when it comes to secret prisons, there are various things we know we don’t yet now, 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.Our coalition of lawyers who vigorously object to the U.S. taking part in torture have 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 will match their accounts with the flight logs.In the meantime, we have plenty of clues as to where the CIA’s criminal activity is festering.
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 U.S. Constitution.” Guantánamo, along with the Bush administration, should consider a change of motto.
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