Six Years of Guantanamo: Enough Is Enough!

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted January 11, 2008.

The Bush administration has maintained a low profile over the last month, as waves of indignation over the destruction of CIA videotapes showing the torture of two "high value" detainees have lapped ever closer to the White House. In the last few weeks, as coverage of the presidential primaries consumed the media, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney must also have been hoping that they would be able to escape scrutiny on this bleak anniversary. It is, however, imperative that they are not allowed to do so. Despite its claims that it "does not torture," this is an administration drenched in torture, which must one day be made answerable for its crimes.

Six years ago, on Jan. 11, 2002, the first of 778 prisoners -- referred to as "detainees" and identified only by numbers -- arrived at a hastily erected prison in the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where, ever since, they have been subjected to a disturbingly lawless experiment.

Under the terms of a military order initiated in November 2001, the president claimed that he could hold the detainees indefinitely, without charge or trial, as "enemy combatants." Guantánamo, leased from Cuba in 1903 under an arrangement that cannot be broken unless both countries agree to it, was specifically chosen for this experiment because it was presumed to be beyond the reach of the U.S. courts.

For two and a half years, the administration succeeded in its aims, running an illegal offshore interrogation center, which mutated into a torture prison when the detainees proved resistant to interrogation. The "enhanced interrogation techniques" introduced by the administration included prolonged solitary confinement, forced nudity, sexual and religious humiliation, sleep deprivation, the use of extreme heat and cold, and the use of painful stress positions. Despite condemnation by world leaders, international legal experts, global bodies including the United Nations and an unprecedented array of former U.S. military commanders, the administration defined torture so narrowly -- as being equivalent to organ failure or death -- that it refused to concede that it was actually engaged in torture.

The irony, which became apparent only later, was that the reason that so many of the detainees were not forthcoming in their interrogations was not because they were al-Qaeda terrorists who were trained to resist interrogation, but because they had no information to give. When the government's own documents were analyzed, in reports by the Seton Hall Law School (PDF), and in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison, it became apparent that the majority of the detainees had not been captured by U.S. forces on the battlefield, as alleged, but had been sold to them by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments of $5,000 a head for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects were widespread.

In June 2004, the U.S. courts finally caught up with Guantánamo. In a momentous ruling, the Supreme Court insisted that Guantánamo was "in every practical respect a United States territory," and that the detainees had habeas corpus rights -- the right to challenge the basis of their detention before an impartial court.

Undeterred, the administration allowed lawyers access to the detainees, but refused to allow them anywhere near the U.S. courts, establishing, instead, a system of military tribunals -- the Combatant Status Review Tribunals -- as a mockery of their habeas rights. In these tribunals, the detainees were allowed to tell their own stories, in response to the government's allegations against them, but were not allowed legal representation. Moreover, the tribunals were empowered to accept secret evidence, obtained through the torture, coercion or bribery of other detainees, which was not revealed to the defendants and could not even be challenged.

In some ways, of course, there is more to celebrate today than there was on Guantánamo's fifth anniversary. In the last year, a number of whistleblowers -- former military officials who worked on the tribunals -- have bravely stepped forward to condemn the tribunal process. Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, who spoke out in June, described them as a sham, reliant upon vague, unsubstantiated and generic evidence, and designed merely to approve the detainees' prior designation as "enemy combatants," and in October an Army major, speaking anonymously, added his complaints, revealing the deliberate exclusion of exculpatory evidence, the reconvening of tribunals when an unfavorable result was produced, and the pressure exerted on tribunal members from higher up the command structure.

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Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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