Pain in the Gulagseditorial - SchNEWS, 12 May 2005"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." - George Bush, 2nd Inaugural Speech. Dubya's Inaugural Speech was chocka with references to freedom and full to bursting with rhetoric and fine notions. His speechwriters must have picked up some overtime on that one. When he'd stumbled through the last prompt, Dubya waddled happily home and went back to Gulag building. There are now some 2.2 million prisoners in the land of the free, nearly twice as many as in 1990. That gives the US the biggest prison population in the world and one of the highest proportions of the population in jail, alongside top tourist destinations like North Korea. Young black men are 10 times more likely to be in prison than white men. Forced labour and violence are commonplace. But even these prisoners are luckier than some; they know the crime they are accused of and the length of their sentence - unlike the detainees in the US's network of secret prisons. Guantanamo Bay is only the most visible (and therefore the most accountable) part of an expanding global underworld holding thousands without trial in massive prison camps across Iraq and Afghanistan, on board warships in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean and in virtually every nasty regime in the Middle East. Guantanamo Bay, or 'Gitmo' to its friends, only holds around 540 men (and kids) which makes it relatively small. The US has set up many military prisons in Afghanistan where detainees are held in secret. Many prisoners there were captured in other countries and then flown to Afghanistan. Khaled Al-Masri, a German car salesman, claims he was kidnapped in Macedonia while on holiday, beaten, stripped, bound and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. There is no way he can prove his story because he was a secret prisoner, but there are more and more stories like his coming out. And for every secret prisoner that comes out with a story to tell, there must be many more that don't tell or simply never come out at all. The biggest American-run facilities are at the Bagram airbase, north of Kabul in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, where tens of thousands of detainees are held. Cherif Bassiouni, the UN's top human rights investigator in Afghanistan released a report recently speaking out against the US policy of holding huge numbers of prisoners without trial and refusing to allow anyone to visit them or monitor their situation (ie check if they are being tortured). He estimated that around 1,000 Afghans had been detained, and accused US troops of breaking into homes, arresting residents and abusing them. Within days he had been fired as a result of heavy US pressure. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The Whole Cart's Rotten The US has consistently refused to allow scrutiny of their prison practices; when the truth seeps out there is first denial, then whitewash. Recently the US army investigated itself (!) over the Abu Ghraib scandal, clearing four out of five top officers. Army statements when the scandal first broke blamed "a few bad apples". Charles Graner, the grinning torturing goon from the famous photos, worked as a jailer in the US before going to Iraq. It seems likely he picked up his torture tips from other sadistic rednecks. The New York Times reported that the humiliations depicted in the Abu Ghraib pictures are regularly practiced back home in domestic US prisons. The reporter, Fox Butterfield, dug up examples of hooding, stripping naked and forced sex inflicted by guards in jails in Arizona, Utah, Virginia and Texas. The bad apple theory falls down due to the emerging evidence of a widespread pattern of abuse encouraged and coordinated from the top of the command structure. There is even a codename for the operation in Iraq to extract information with torture: Copper Green. Donald Rumsfeld was the architect of this project and there is an increasing mass of evidence from officials involved with it. Defending the cover-up of Copper Green in Iraq, a government consultant said, "Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison." At the same time as trying to suppress the scandal of prisons in Iraq, the US has been trying to keep a lid on the legal challenges to Guantanamo Bay. In July 2004 the US Supreme Court ruled that a federal court in Washington could hear a case to decide if the detentions in Cuba were unconstitutional or against US law. The military kangaroo courts that were meant to dispense 'justice' to the detainees were described by the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers as unethical. Their head recommended all his members boycott the show trials as they would not be able to defend their clients properly, and failure to do so might result in them being put to death. How irritating for the government to face such scrutiny at home: what the US learnt with Guantanamo and Abu Graibh is that secrecy is the key to getting away with murder. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Who Ya Gonna Call? It came out last year that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, had approved the secret keeping of "ghost detainees" in Iraq. They were kept off the registers that were shown to the Red Cross and therefore lost the chance of being visited or having other rights. According to some US and UK military officials there are more than 10,000 "ghost detainees" being held. The difference between them and the Guantanamo detainees is that nobody knows where they are or what is happening to them - which means that the US has the freedom to do anything to them. Maybe that's what George meant in the speech. Now more prisoners are candidates for more complete invisibility by being sent for detention in secret locations abroad. The Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo will be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and on March 7 they confirmed that 211 prisoners had left the prison. A senior US official told the New York Times that three-quarters of the 550 prisoners who were held at Guantánamo Bay no longer have any intelligence of value. But they will not be released out of concern that they pose a continuing threat to the US. "You're basically keeping them off the battlefield, and, unfortunately in the war on terrorism, the battlefield is everywhere." We'll leave the last word to Dubya. More wise words from his Second Inaugural Speech - "We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." * SchNEWS VocabWatch: gulag (noun): 1. A network of forced labour camps in the former Soviet Union; 2. A forced labour camp or prison, especially for political dissidents; 3. A place or situation of great suffering and hardship. * A new book 'Inside the Wire' blows the whistle on the hell-hole that is Guantánamo Bay. Erik Saar is an Arabic speaking American soldier, was a translator in interrogation sessions for six months. His tale describes his gradual disillusionment, from arriving as a soldier keen to do his duty to eventually leaving believing the regime to be a breach of human rights and a disaster for the war on terror. Countries the US transfers prisoners to for routine torture - Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. - SchNEWS (12th May 2005) |