In the article, “The ‘Worst of the Worst’?: 9/11, Guantánamo and the failures of US corporate media,” which is available here on FAIR’s website, I examine the unwillingness of the media to criticise the Bush administration’s “war on terror” until after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004, and how the treasure trove of documents about the Guantánamo prisoners that were released under duress by the Pentagon in 2005 and 2006 were only adequately analyzed by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey and by myself, in my book The Guantánamo Files and my subsequent work.

I also examine how, under Obama, the media have allowed themselves to be seduced by Pentagon propaganda about the numbers of alleged “recidivists” released from Guantánamo, which has contributed enormously to the skewed debate about he closure of the prison, dominated by Republicans cynically using Guantánamo as part of their political campaigning.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has, since 1986, been challenging media bias and censorship, and back in 2009, I was delighted to be asked to contribute an article about Guantánamo, “Dangerous Revisionism Over Guantánamo: Citing dirty evidence to defend dubious detentions,” dealing with the New York Times‘ reporting on Guantánamo, to their monthly magazine, Extra!

FAIR had leapt to my defense when, in February 2008, the New York Times (after pressure was exerted on its editors) apologized for giving me a byline on a front-page sorry that I had written with Carlotta Gall about the death of an Afghan prisoner at Guantánamo (because I had “a point of view”). That article was particularly critical of the authorities’ disregard for the prisoners, and whether or not there was actually any reason to hold them, and I was grateful for the support shown by FAIR and by others, including Scott Horton. I am also pleased to have been interviewed on a few occasions on FAIR’s radio program, CounterSpin (see here, here and here).

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I am delighted to have been approached by FAIR to write a brief review of the media’s response to 9/11 and the “war on terror” over the last ten years. As I explain in the article, the media “bear a large responsibility for having allowed cynical lawmakers to portray Guantánamo as a prison holding ‘the worst of the worst,’ despite so much evidence that Bush administration officials were lying when they first coined that phrase.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As a result, Cheney knew that, on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that launched the “war on terror” that he is still so concerned to defend, his voice would be echoing in the ears of millions of his countrymen and women, helping to disguise a bitter truth: that, following the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was largely responsible for the abomination that is Guantánamo, and for the torture to which prisoners were subjected from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantánamo and the “black sites” that littered the world.

Alarmingly, while Cheney has been largely successful in claiming that the use of torture was helpful, despite a lack of evidence that this was the case, what strikes me as even more alarming is that many Americans are still unaware of the extent to which the torture for which Cheney was such a cheerleader did not keep them safe from terrorist attacks, but actually provided a lie that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

As a long time believer in unfettered executive power, Cheney’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks, along with those of his legal counsel, David Addington. The two men had met while defending Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal, on the basis that the President should be beyond criticism, and it was Cheney and Addington who were behind a military order issued by George W. Bush on November 13, 2001, which established the President’s right to hold those he regarded as terrorists as a new type of prisoner (who later became the infamous “enemy combatants”), and, if he wished, to prosecute them in trials by military commission, which were designed to secure easy convictions and to use evidence derived through the use of torture.

It was Addington, no doubt after consultation with Cheney, who wrote the memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, signed by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, which claimed that the Geneva Conventions contained “quaint” provisions, and that the circumstances in which the “war on terror” was being waged rendered “obsolete” the Conventions’ “strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.” The memo advised the President to discard the Geneva Conventions for the prisoners at Guantánamo, which had opened two weeks earlier.

The purpose was to allow coercive interrogations, and even the use of torture, and this became official policy on August 1, 2002, when another of Cheney’s colleagues, John Yoo, a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice, wrote two memos known as the “torture memos,” which attempted to redefine torture — including the use of waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning — so that it could be used by the CIA.

With the help of another of Cheney’s circle of close colleagues — Jim Haynes, the Pentagon’s General Counsel — the torture techniques chosen were reverse-engineered from those taught in US military schools to help US military personnel resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy. Haynes had made the first approach to the organization responsible for the program, known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), and he also played a role in the spread of torture techniques to Guantánamo, as approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in November 2002, which then spread to Iraq, leading to the horrors that were revealed around the world when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004.

Even so, Cheney’s biggest crime, to my mind, remains the way in which, while pretending to use torture to protect the American people from further terrorist attacks, he actually used it to attempt to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This bleak story involves Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan — Khalden — that was shut down by the Taliban in 2000 after he refused to allow Osama bin Laden to take it over.  Al-Libi was initially interrogated by the FBI, but they were brushed aside by the CIA, who flew al-Libi to Egypt, where the torturers of Hosni Mubarak’s savage regime secured a patently false confession that Saddam Hussein had met with two al-Qaeda operatives to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons.

Al-Libi recanted the false confession obtained through torture — which apparently included waterboarding — in 2004, although the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded at the time of the confession, in February 2002, that al-Libi had misled his torturers. However, no one told Colin Powell, who used it in the presentation he made to the UN Security Council in February 2003, a month before the invasion. This is alarming enough, but as it is clear that Dick Cheney knew about the DIA’s analysis that al-Libi had lied, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that, while pretending to protect the American people, Cheney was actually responsible for using a lie obtained through torture to justify an illegal war that would lead to the deaths of thousands of US military personnel, and of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

Torture is a crime, for which Dick Cheney should pay, on the 10th anniversary of the 9//11 attacks, rather than being feted as some sort of entertainingly opinionated elder statesman. Above all, however, the al-Libi episode reveals the former Vice President not only as a torturer, but also as some sort of a traitor, making his continued ability to walk free, and to continue spreading his self-serving lies, a damning state of affairs for America as a whole, and one that should make decent Americans recoil in shame and horror from what they and their country have become.

Note: For more on the bleak story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, see Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison and WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. For more on the malignant influence of Dick Cheney, see Dick Cheney: invisible tyrant, Dick Cheney: more horrors from the ‘Vice-President for Torture’, The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers and Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Overland was founded in 1954, and Jacinda described it accurately as “one of the oldest, most esteemed and most radical of Australia’s literary magazines.” Writing on behalf of the editor Jeff Sparrow, she asked if I would be interested in a commission to write a 3,000-word essay on what the 9/11 attacks, whose tenth anniversary falls in just two weeks, did to civil liberties and the rule of law in America.

Needless to say, I leapt at the opportunity, and the article, “When America changed forever: Human rights ten years after 9/11,” has just been published in the latest issue of Overland, issue 204. In it, I revisit the baleful history of America’s flight from decency and the rule of law under George W. Bush, and President Obama’s failure to throughly repudiate it, or to hold anyone accountable for the torture and lies that defined his predecessor’s administration.

Profiled here, the latest issue of Overland contains, in Jeff Sparrow’s words, articles that plumb the darkness of the last ten years, echoing the words of Georg Trakl, an Austrian poet who died in 1914, aged 27, and who wrote with power about the horrors of the First World War, for whom a “decaying generation … cold and evil” presided over “a dark future prepared/For the pale grandchild.”

As Jeff also states, the articles in this issue of Overland, which plumb the darkness of the 21st century so far, deal with “the normalization of torture and abuse, wars abroad and austerity at home, the ongoing immiseration of asylum seekers, and all the rest of it. But they’re also suffused with a modicum of optimism, a sense that, perhaps, the gloom is finally clearing.”

I certainly hope that is the case, but in the meantime, I hope to have alerted readers in Australia to my presence in print on the other side of the world from London, and if anyone in Australia or elsewhere would like to subscribe to Overland or buy the latest issue for AUS $14.95, the details are here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Some of the key discoveries in the Guantánamo files are the documents on the 201 prisoners released between 2002 and summer 2004, which cover new ground, as the US military has never publicly released any of this information before. For the other 578 prisoners, information has at least been revealed through the release of the government’s allegations against the prisoners, and the transcripts of the tribunals and review boards used to assess their significance, which were released in 2006 (with follow-ups in the years since), but for these 201 prisoners, many of the stories are being related for the very first time. These are mostly dispiriting revelations about how children as young as 14 and old men in their 80s were rounded up and sent to Guantánamo, joining farmers, taxi drivers and unwilling Taliban recruits — hordes of the innocent or the insignificant, whose stories help to confirm the folly of Guantánamo.

Just as significant, however, are the stories of the majority of the other prisoners — the nearly 400 others released, and most of the 172 still held. Understanding their stories generally requires more effort, as the allegations marshalled against them seem to prove what a threat they are — until, that is, the sources of these allegations are investigated, and are revealed, time and again, as very dubious indeed.

Although JTF-GTMO, the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo, responsible for creating these files, has done a good job of creating the illusion of coherent intelligence dossiers, an illusion is all it is. On close inspection, the files are full of lies and distortions, with certain figures appearing over and over again. They include “high-value detainees” like Abu Zubaydah, waterboarded 83 times and held for four and a half years in secret CIA prisons, and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, tortured in Egypt until he falsely confessed that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein (used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003), who was finally sent back to Libya to be murdered.

There are also others, held only in Guantánamo, who are known as notoriously unreliable informants, and who, whether through the use of torture, coercion, or bribery (the promise of better living conditions) have repeatedly told lies about their fellow prisoners. These have been seen through, generally by some official figures at Guantánamo, and also by judges in the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, who have recognized their baleful influence, and have often moved to dismiss their testimony, damaging or even eviscerating the government’s cases.

There are dangerous men in Guantánamo, of course — some, if not all of the 14 ‘high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, who arrived in Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, some of the ten others transferred to Guantánamo from secret prisons in September 2004, plus a handful of others. Essentially, these are the 36 men recommended for trials by the Obama administration’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which spent the whole of 2009 analysing the prisoners’ cases.

As for the rest of the 172 men still held, 47 of whom are being held indefinitely without charge or trial by President Obama on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, even though no evidence exists that can be used in court, these documents reveal how the distortions engendered by Guantánamo continue to erode all hope of a rational settlement to the vexed question of when Guantánamo will actually close.

When innocent people are labelled as “low risk” detainees, and foot soldiers are labelled as “medium risk” or “high risk,” as they are in these official documents, the proper outcome — that prisoners should either be charged or released, and the abomination that is Guantánamo should be closed as soon as possible — is lost in a miasma of misplaced fear.

Politically, it appears that President Obama has decided that Guantánamo is too toxic to touch. That is a disgrace, as it shows him to be a man lacking in firm principles, after all his fine talk about the importance of justice and the law, when he was a Senator, and it is also a tragedy for America.

I won’t hold my breath hoping for enlightenment, but these documents released by WikiLeaks deserve to be read widely, and to be acted upon decisively by Americans who care about justice and the rule of law, because, with Guantánamo still open, they reveal the unjustifiable triumph, from beyond the electoral grave, of the Bush adminstration, whose actions, whatever their supposed justification, took the country to a wretched and disturbing place that still needs to be abandoned and repudiated as a thoroughly unacceptable aberration from the principles on which the United States was founded.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

This is an important article, in which Hertzberg contrasts Guantánamo unfavorably with how the United States treated prisoners of war in the Second World War, describing how a “relative handful of shackled, isolated prisoners has somehow been permitted to engender a miasma of popular fear and political cowardice that contrasts shamefully with the matter-of-fact courage of an earlier and simpler time.” In addition, when writing about how Obama’s promise to close Guantánamo has not come to pass, he correctly identifies the reasons as “a combination of political nihilism on the part of Republicans, political ineptitude on the part of his own Administration, and political fecklessness on the part of the people’s representatives on Capitol Hill.”

Crucially, however, Hertzberg recommends that Obama could, and should address “the lack of any official accountability for the abuses of the past, especially the embrace of torture,” noting, “Perhaps there are good, prudential reasons for stopping short of prosecuting those who authorized this vile offense to elementary morality for the crimes against American and international law that it entailed,” but adding, “No such reasons forbid the appointment of a truth commission,” which “would be a healthy act of atonement.”

Prisoners
By Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, April 18, 2011

On May 13, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The Allies suddenly found themselves saddled with nearly three hundred thousand prisoners of war, including the bulk of General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Unable to feed or house their share, the British asked their American comrades to relieve them of the burden. And so, by the tens of thousands, German soldiers were loaded aboard Liberty Ships, which had carried American troops across the Atlantic. Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.

The “war on terror” is a very different kind of war, and the prisoners thereof are very different, too. It’s not just that a higher proportion of them appear to have been truly dedicated to the ideology in whose name they were fighting, or that they were unaffiliated with a government. It’s also that their numbers are small — a hamlet compared to the city-size P.O.W. population of 1945. In the nine years since the creation of the purpose-built prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a grand total of seven hundred and seventy-nine men (and boys — the youngest was fifteen years old when he was captured) have been sent there. It currently holds a hundred and seventy-two. Yet this relative handful of shackled, isolated prisoners has somehow been permitted to engender a miasma of popular fear and political cowardice that contrasts shamefully with the matter-of-fact courage of an earlier and simpler time.

A week ago, on the same day that President Obama officially launched his campaign for reelection, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced that Guantánamo’s most notorious inmate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, along with four others accused of direct involvement in the 9/11 attacks, will at last be brought to trial — but on Cuban, not American, soil, and before a panel of military officers, not a civilian judge and jury. You may recall that the last time Barack Obama was a candidate he promised that, if elected, he would shut Guantánamo down (by then a fairly uncontroversial position, one that even President Bush and his would-be Republican successor had come around to) and that he would see to it that accused terrorists were prosecuted in civilian courts rather than by military commissions. He promised, too, that his Administration would not continue indefinite detention without indictment or trial and, of course, that it would put a definitive end to the use of torture. He has been able to keep only the last of these promises fully. The rest have been undone by a combination of political nihilism on the part of Republicans, political ineptitude on the part of his own Administration, and political fecklessness on the part of the people’s representatives on Capitol Hill.

Two days after the inauguration, Obama, in the dazzling dawn of his Presidency, issued an executive order directing that the Guantánamo detention camps “be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” The slippage began less than a month later, with a complicated legal tussle over seventeen Gitmo prisoners. Even though they were Chinese Uighurs who had had nothing to do with anti-American violence, the mere possibility that they might set foot on the United States mainland was enough to ignite a brushfire of not-in-my-back-yard hysteria. By May of 2009, it had reached the point where the Senate voted, 90–6, not only to keep Gitmo open indefinitely but also to block the transfer of any of its detainees to U.S. soil, where the civilian courts are. (Though all six dissenters were Democrats, the rest of the caucus voted with the Republicans.) At times, Administration bungling has enabled local grandstanding. Later in 2009, the Justice Department neglected to prepare New York’s City Hall for the impact of its original plan for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which was to try him in a Manhattan civilian court. Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and Senator Charles Schumer quickly turned tail, and so did Obama.

A dispiriting series of tactical retreats from civil-liberties principles has followed. In January of this year, the President signed a politically veto-proof defense-appropriation bill that had been amended to again block funding for any transfer of detainees from Guantánamo to the home of the brave. In March, Obama issued another executive order. While it establishes twice-yearly reviews of the status of current detainees, confirms their habeas-corpus rights, and permits them to be represented by outside lawyers as well as by government-appointed defenders, the order also allows trials by military commissions to go forward, and at Guantánamo to boot. Now, in April, we learn that one such trial will be the case that, a year ago, Holder said (to this magazine’s Jane Mayer) would be “the defining event of my time as Attorney General.” It appears that Holder’s prediction will come true, though not in the way he intended. He was sure that he had an overwhelming case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one that would not have relied on evidence obtained through torture. (Mohammed was waterboarded a hundred and eighty-three times.) But he lost the bureaucratic battle. His anger last week as he announced the decision could not quite mask the Administration’s shame.

The collapse of Obama’s effort to close Guantánamo is the kind of failure that, in our atomized, increasingly dysfunctional political system, has a thousand deadbeat dads. But it has always been within the President’s power to remedy one aspect of the moral morass that Guantánamo symbolizes: the lack of any official accountability for the abuses of the past, especially the embrace of torture. There is no dispute that there was torture, that it was systematic, and that it was encouraged at the highest levels — George W. Bush, in his memoir, currently adorning the best-seller lists, practically boasts of approving it. Perhaps there are good, prudential reasons for stopping short of prosecuting those who authorized this vile offense to elementary morality for the crimes against American and international law that it entailed. No such reasons forbid the appointment of a truth commission. The work of such a commission, charged with compiling the record, affixing responsibility, and formally acknowledging what was done, would be a healthy act of atonement.

Obama has said more than once that he prefers to look forward, not backward. Not everyone feels that way. As soon as the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reversal was announced, Peter King, the New York Republican who heads the House Committee on Homeland Security, called it “yet another vindication of President Bush’s detention policies.” It is no such thing. Even with all the failings of the current Administration, the difference between its approach and its predecessor’s is the difference between night and day, albeit a rainy, miserable day, overcast with dark clouds. But, by elevating amnesia to official policy, the President has put himself in a poor position to make even that argument.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Ending Bush’s big lie on Guantánamo
Andy Worthington, The Guardian, January 6, 2011

In the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

This was not true, as reports over the years have demonstrated. A former military interrogator in Afghanistan, writing under the pseudonym Chris Mackey, explained in his book The Interrogators that there was no screening process in place, and that every Arab who came into US custody, by whatever method, had to be transferred to Guantánamo.

Moreover, in 2006, an analysis of the Pentagon’s own allegations against 517 prisoners (compiled after 200 men and boys had already been released), and conducted by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, found that 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

In addition, around half the prisoners were not captured in Afghanistan, but were either seized in Pakistan, or crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and although many of the men were foot soldiers for the Taliban, who had been involved in the long-standing civil war against the Northern Alliance, which had begun many years before the 9/11 attacks, others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, or economic migrants, and only 33 of the remaining 174 prisoners have been recommended for trial by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the cases in 2009.

As the prison at Guantánamo prepares to start its tenth year of operations (on January 11), and as I begin a week of events in New York and Washington D.C. to raise awareness of the remaining prisoners, these men are still, for the most part, as dehumanised as they were under President Bush.

Part of the attempt to raise awareness involves showing the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash, and which features compelling and emotional testimony from former Guantánamo prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, both seized in 2002 from the homes where they were living in Pakistan, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and sent to Guantánamo.

Last year, I travelled around the UK with Omar Deghayes, showing the film to audiences of students and activists who were grateful for the opportunity to meet Omar, after listening to his harrowing descriptions of how he was mistreated, and how the British security services colluded in his abuse, but when I travel to the US, I am not allowed to visit with Omar, or with Moazzam, or with any other cleared prisoner.

Audiences in the States are also moved by Omar’s testimony, when they have the opportunity to see it, but it would have a much greater impact if they were able to meet a former prisoner in person.

Sadly, the Obama administration is largely to blame for this state of affairs. In early 2009, White House Counsel Greg Craig was close to finalising a plan to rehouse a handful of cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated safely. These men were the Uighurs, Muslims for China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake, who had won their habeas corpus petition in a US court in October 2008, and their presence in the US would have done more to destroy the Bush administration’s enduring lies than any other gesture.

However, when Republicans got wind of it, and reacted with unjustifiable outrage, Obama quashed the plan, making it difficult for the US to find third countries prepared to take cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated, and contributing to the paralysis that Obama finds himself in today: presiding over a prison in which, although over half the remaining prisoners have been cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, cynical lawmakers, and the President’s own cowardice, have made it increasingly difficult for him to release anyone.

Anonymity — the dehumanisation of these men — helps to maintain the illusion that their ongoing detention is somehow justifiable, but if their stories, and the circumstances of their capture, were more widely known, the Bush administration’s enduring mythology might be thoroughly punctured, and more substantial steps taken — or demanded — to secure their release. Bringing the stories of Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg to the American public can, hopefully, play a part in this still necessary process.

Details of this evening’s screening:

Friday January 7, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Scott Horton.
Revolution Books, 146 West 26th Street (between 6th & 7th Ave.), New York, NY 10001.
A donation of $10 is requested for the film, drinks and popcorn, to benefit Revolution Books. For further information, see the Revolution Books website, or contact the store by email or by phone: 212-691-3345. A Facebook page is here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The new president started well, freezing the much-criticized Military Commission trial system on his first day in office, and issuing executive orders on Day 2, upholding the absolute ban on torture, ordering the humane treatment of wartime prisoners in interrogation, and promising that Guantánamo would be closed within a year.

After this bold start, however, the program slipped, first into inertia, as an interagency Task Force, established to review the prisoners’ cases, found that information about the prisoners was scattered throughout numerous departments and agencies. Instead of drawing on evidence that the men had largely been rounded up by the US military’s allies in Afghanistan, at a time when bounty payments were widespread, the administration began to fear releasing prisoners who might resort to terrorism after their release (perhaps because they had been radicalized by their treatment under George W. Bush).

Senior officials also appeared to ignore court rulings dealing with the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, even though, in 4 out of every 5 cases examined, judges found that the government’s supposed evidence consisted mainly of confessions made under torture or duress, or allegations made by other prisoners, who were either unreliable or had been bribed or coerced into doing so.

After the inertia came cowardly backtracking. In April, when Republican uproar followed the court-ordered release of Justice Department memos purporting to redefine torture, so that it could be used by the CIA, and another court order to release photos of the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama stopped the release of the photos and quashed plans to bring some innocent Guantánamo prisoners to live in the United States.

These men were the Uighurs, Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake, who could not be repatriated because of fears that the Chinese government would torture them.

By capitulating to pressure, and putting pragmatism before principles, Obama showed Republicans that he would cave in if pushed hard enough, and his opponents — and some cowardly members of his own party — responded by passing legislation preventing any prisoner cleared for release by the Bush administration, by the courts (following successful habeas petitions) or by Obama’s Task Force from being resettled in the United States.

Obama’s capitulation, and his inability to control Congress, also made it extremely difficult to find new homes for the dozens of other cleared prisoners, from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan, who, like the Uighurs, could not be repatriated because of fears that they would be abused on their return.

America’s allies in Europe were asked to accept these prisoners, and to refrain from pointing out that the US was doing nothing to clean up its own mess, with the result that, by the end of the year, only nine men had been given new homes in Europe.

As Obama’s principled stand eroded, he also dismayed lawyers, progressives and human rights activists by reintroducing the Military Commissions and stating that, according to legislation passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (the Authorization for Use of Military Force), he was entitled to hold dozens of other men indefinitely, without charge or trial.

As critics noted accurately, the result was a three-tier system that made a mockery of justice. Essentially, if a conviction could be guaranteed, prisoners would be put forward for federal court trials, as happened in November with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. However, if the evidence was weaker, they would face trials by Military Commission, and if it was weaker still or unusable — alarmingly, because it had been obtained through torture, which is unreliable, as well as inadmissible in either federal courts or the Military Commissions — the men in question would be held indefinitely.

As the anniversary approached, and the administration announced that 116 prisoners had been cleared for release by the Task Force, the repatriation of six Yemenis offered the slim hope that one of the major obstacles to the closure of Guantánamo was finally being addressed. Yemenis comprise 86 of the remaining 198 prisoners, but long-standing fears about the Yemeni government’s ability to monitor released prisoners meant that, of the 561 prisoners released between May 2002 and November 2009, only 16 were Yemenis.

However, in the wake of the failed plane bombing on Christmas Day, and exaggerated claims that the would-be bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had connections with Saudi prisoners released from Guantánamo in a terrorist group in Yemen, Barack Obama once more capitulated to hysterical fearmongering, announcing that no more prisoners would be returned to Yemen in the foreseeable future.

This not only cast a dark cloud over Monday’s anniversary, dashing hopes that the prison’s closure will take place any time soon; it also, again, involved a refusal by Obama to fight back against lies and distortions, by holding firm to two important points that were easily ignored in the media’s blizzard of fear.

Firstly, there was no reason to suppose that the cleared Yemenis, held for eight years, had any connection to a recently established terrorist group in their homeland whose ranks appeared to peppered with Saudis, and secondly, the handful of Saudis released from Guantánamo, who had apparently become involved in terrorism, were released not by Barack Obama, but by George W. Bush, despite warnings from the US intelligence services that they posed a threat to the United States.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This article was published exclusively in the Daily Star, Lebanon, as “At eight, Guantánamo allows little hope.”

My particular concern is with Guantánamo, for two reasons: firstly, because, on this sad anniversary, we are still waiting for justice to be delivered in the cases of the few dozen men apparently involved in the attacks, or in other acts of international terrorism; and secondly, because the majority of the 225 men still held in Guantánamo had nothing to do with the above, and it is time that their long imprisonment came to an end.

In the cases of the few dozen genuine terror suspects in Guantánamo, I urge President Obama to put them forward for trial in federal courts, and not to revive the Military Commissions that, as former prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld recently explained, are “beyond repair.”

In the cases of the other men, I explain how, despite considerable success in their habeas corpus hearings (in which 29 out of 36 appeals have been granted), the prisoners’ quest for justice is still limited by an outmoded review process in which the courts are obliged merely to consider whether the government has proved that they were connected to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban.

With each passing year, I believe that the rationale for holding genuine terror suspects alongside Taliban foot soldiers, seized in connection with the overthrow of the Taliban government, as though they were one and the same, becomes increasingly intolerable, and I call for swift action to acknowledge that this is the case, and to facilitate the promised closure of the prison by January 2010.

I also discuss Bagram and the fate of those held in secret prisons or rendered to other countries, but my focus is predominantly on Guantánamo, because, on the eighth anniversary of 9/11, it remains the most visible and bleakly iconic symbol of the Bush administration’s hideous response to the terrible events of that day.

As I explain in the conclusion to my article, “Guantánamo remains the most obvious challenge to President Obama’s stated ambition to ‘regain America’s moral stature in the world,’” but as it now stands, “justice is being delivered neither to those regarded as genuinely dangerous, nor to those whose significance has been exaggerated.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

The Guardian article was cross-posted on Common Dreams and AlterNet.

I.

The mesh-wire cages, suitable only for animals, are empty now and overgrown, but they will stand forever as a symbol of the Bush administration’s inept, brutal and destructive “War on Terror” policies, implemented in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001.

This is Camp X-Ray, the first of the prison camps at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and it was here that the grimly iconic photos were taken, on January 11, 2002, showing the first prisoners arriving at the prison from Afghanistan. The images of these shackled and dehumanized figures, clad in orange, kneeling on gravel in painful stress positions, and with their eyes and ears blocked, have come to define the “War on Terror” as much as the notorious photos of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

At the time, the administration claimed that the prisoners were “the worst of the worst.” On January 22, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, “These people are committed terrorists. We are keeping them off the street and out of the airlines and out of nuclear power plants and out of ports across this country and across other countries.” On a visit to Guantánamo on January 27, he claimed that the prisoners were “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

In the weeks that followed, however, this hardcore rhetoric slipped, when Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert of the Marines, who was the prison’s first commander, admitted, “A large number claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

Although no one knew it at the time, this frank admission neatly encapsulated all that was wrong with Guantánamo. Following a Military Order issued in November 2001 and an Executive Order issued in February 2002 (PDF), the administration had labeled all the prisoners as “unlawful enemy combatants,” who could be held without charge or trial, and had, moreover, deprived them of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, but in fact little was known about any of them.

In Afghanistan, where most of the prisoners had been held and processed before their long flight to Guantánamo, in brutal, makeshift prisons inside the US bases at Kandahar airport and Bagram airbase, the US military had been ordered to dispense with the Geneva Conventions’ Article 5 competent tribunals. The hearings, which involved calling witnesses close to the time and place of capture, were a traditional manner of separating soldiers from civilians caught up in the fog of war. During the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 competent tribunals, and in nearly three-quarters of them the prisoners were found to be innocent and were subsequently released.

Moreover, as Chris Mackey (the pseudonym of a former interrogator at Kandahar and Bagram) explained in his book The Interrogators, this lack of screening was compounded by instructions from the Pentagon, which stipulated that all “non-Afghan Taliban/foreign fighters” were to be sent to Guantánamo. As Mackey noted, “Strictly speaking, that meant every Arab we encountered was in for a long-term stay and an eventual trip to Cuba.” The same, it transpired, happened to the majority of the 220 or so Afghans who were also bound like beasts and flown to Guantánamo.

It took years for the truth to emerge: that there had been no screening process for the “worst of the worst,” and that, although perhaps 40 of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo were involved with al-Qaeda, the other 95 percent were either completely innocent men — humanitarian aid workers, missionaries, economic migrants, drifters or others fleeing religious persecution — or foot soldiers for the Taliban, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before 9/11.

Some of these men may well have held anti-American sentiments — based, it must be said, on America’s foreign policy, rather then a hatred of Americans and American values — but few, if any had any meaningful knowledge of al-Qaeda, the 9/11 attacks, or any other terrorist plots (until a handful of significant prisoners were transferred into Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006), and no one knew the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, despite being asked ad nauseam. For terror cells to be successful, secrecy is the key. As few people as possible must know the plans, and in this al-Qaeda had been particularly successful.

For the rest of the prisoners — the Afghans — the truth was equally bleak. Dozens were unwilling Taliban recruits, forced to serve on pain of death or punishment, and numerous others were betrayed by rivals, who took advantage of the gullibility of the US forces. Deprived of useful intelligence in Afghanistan for at least a decade, and unwilling to risk US troops in a full-scale invasion, the administration arranged for Special Forces to topple the Taliban by forging alliances with various warlords, whom they recruited to fight their battles for them, even though they had no knowledge of the complicated tribal nature of Afghan society, and were blind to the fact that the corruption of many of their new-found allies had prompted the rise of the Taliban in the first place.

Towering over all these failures was the money: Toyota Landcruisers stuffed full of dollar bills, used to secure the warlords’ dubious services, and bounty payments of $5,000 a head for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.” These offers were printed on leaflets prepared by the military’s PsyOps teams and airdropped into villages, where, as the leaflets proudly proclaimed, “You can receive millions of dollars for helping the anti-Taliban force catch al-Qaeda and Taliban murderers. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.” In Pakistan alone, President Pervez Musharraf bragged, in his 2006 autobiography, that in return for handing over 369 terror suspects (including many transferred to Guantánamo), “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

The notorious PsyOps leaflet, offering substantial rewards for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects”

II.

Long before any of this came to light, however, the administration compounded its initial failure to screen the prisoners by embarking on a cruel and misconceived attempt to unlock their mostly non-existent secrets. The end result resembled nothing less than the activities of the witch-hunters of the seventeenth century.

The administration began with a presumption of guilt, and any protestation of innocence was regarded as the sign of a terrorist trained to resist interrogation by al-Qaeda. Those who confessed — however implausible their confessions — were rewarded, while those who remained silent — either because they were genuine terrorists or, at the other end of the spectrum, because they had no intelligence to provide, and were unable or unwilling to dissemble — were subjected to an array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, under any criteria other than those embraced by the administration, would have been regarded as torture.

The authorization for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” beyond those approved in the Army Field Manual (in which physical violence is prohibited and the emphasis is on psychological maneuvers with a proven track record), was signaled in August 2002. In an extraordinary document, known as the “torture memo” after it was leaked in 2004, a number of government lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets the law as it applies to the Executive, attempted to redefine torture.

Under the terms of the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, torture is defined as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” However, the lawyers — John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, under the guidance of David Addington, General Counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney — decided that, for interrogation to count as torture, the pain endured “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

The definition of torture was adjusted partly so that the most senior figures in the administration — including President Bush — could keep a straight face when they declared that America “does not torture,” but it was also revised so that the use of techniques previously regarded as torture, such as waterboarding (an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning), could be used on an a number of “high-value detainees” held in secret CIA prisons.

The general population was not subjected to the worst of these techniques, but in the fall of 2002, in response to requests from senior officials at Guantánamo for the approval of harsher techniques to “break” what were regarded as particularly uncooperative prisoners, Donald Rumsfeld approved a number of previously prohibited techniques, mainly drawn from the US military’s SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which trains the US military to resist interrogation if captured by enemy forces.

These included the use of prolonged solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, forced grooming (the shaving of hair and beards), the use of extreme heat and cold, sexual and religious humiliation, and the use of painful stress positions. Regarded individually, the majority of these techniques would fit the UN definition of torture, but when they were applied together, as they frequently were, there was no doubt that the administration had crossed a line that should not have been crossed, and that Guantánamo had become an experimental prison, focused on interrogation (which itself contravenes the Geneva Conventions), in which the use of torture had become commonplace.

III.

It was inevitable, of course, that America’s leaders would react to the attacks of September 11, 2001 with a show of colossal force. The world’s preeminent military power had not been attacked on its own territory since Pearl Harbor in 1941, and was hardly likely to sit back after such a devastating and symbolic terrorist attack. However, those in charge could hardly have been less qualified to react to the attacks in an appropriate manner.

Behind the presidential façade of George W. Bush, most of the key decisions about America’s response to the attacks were made by Vice President Dick Cheney, with support from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and crucial advice from key lawyers including David Addington and John Yoo. All believed that presidential power had been unjustly eroded since the scandal that forced the resignation of Richard Nixon (under whom both Cheney and Rumsfeld had served). Addington and Cheney had become friends in the Reagan administration, as they tried to shield the President from the fallout from the Iran-Contra scandal, and Yoo, a latecomer, had swallowed their rhetoric whole.

For these men, it was, therefore, predictable that the response to the 9/11 attacks would be a wide-ranging “War on Terror” — rather than a targeted pursuit of a small number of criminals — which granted the President the right to indulge his powers as Commander-in-Chief without any outside interference, but it also played more generally into their long-cherished desire for unfettered executive power.

First they secured Congressional approval for the Authorization of Use of Military Force, the founding document of the “war,” which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

The rest followed more stealthily under the cover of these sweeping wartime powers: the warrantless wiretapping of US citizens; the Military Order giving the President the right to seize and detain “enemy combatants” indefinitely, or to prosecute them in special trials by Military Commission; a memo of January 2002 dismissing the provisions of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and “obsolete”; the Executive Order removing the prisoners’ protections under the Geneva Conventions; the “torture memo” of August 2002; and the approval for reverse engineering SERE techniques for use on prisoners at Guantánamo.

Significantly, not everyone working behind the scenes in the “War on Terror” was happy with these developments. Amongst the most critical were several of the agencies working on interrogations at Guantánamo, who were appalled. The FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) and even the Defense Department’s own Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) all refused to take part in coercive interrogations, and Alberto J. Mora, the Navy’s General Counsel, even took his complaints to the Pentagon. In January 2003, he threatened to reveal publicly the details of the program unless the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were withdrawn.

Rumsfeld agreed, but immediately set up a working group to approve the techniques in a mildly amended form, although Mora was not informed. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004, Mora realized the extent to which he had been sidelined. He told the journalist Jane Mayer, “Everything we had warned against in Guantánamo had happened — but in a different setting.”

IV.

While these struggles remained largely hidden from view, however, other challenges were more difficult to dismiss. Legal challenges to the legitimacy of Guantánamo began almost as soon as the prison opened in January 2002, although it took nearly two and half years for the cases to reach the Supreme Court, allowing the administration a shockingly large window of opportunity to indulge in its extra-legal abuses.

In many ways, the Guantánamo project’s viability was shattered on June 29, 2004, when the Supreme Court ruled, in Rasul v. Bush, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to ask a judge why they were being held, under the 800-year old “Great Writ,” a cornerstone of American justice, inherited from the British, which prevents arbitrary detention. Crucially, the Rasul verdict allowed lawyers to visit the prison (to begin filing habeas petitions on behalf of the prisoners) and finally pierced the veil of secrecy that had been necessary for systemic abuse to take place.

In other respects, however, the administration refused to be swayed by Rasul. Instead of allowing the prisoners access to the US courts, as the Supreme Court intended, the authorities introduced administrative reviews — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) — to ascertain whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly designated as “enemy combatants.” These were a pale mockery of the Article 5 competent tribunals, not just because they took place two and a half years too late, and half a world away from the time and place of capture, but in particular because of reasons identified in June 2007 by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence, who had worked on the tribunals.

In an affidavit for one of the Guantánamo cases, Lt. Col. Abraham declared that the entire process relied on intelligence “of a generalized nature — often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” and was designed, essentially, to rubber-stamp the prisoners’ prior designation as “enemy combatants” without any meaningful review.

Lt. Col. Abraham was undoubtedly correct, as the steady flow of released prisoners’ stories has demonstrated in the years since the CSRTs were convened. Appallingly, however, America’s politicians have never stood up to the administration’s crimes. In response to Rasul, Congress obliged the administration by passing the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), which cast the prisoners’ habeas appeals into a legal limbo, and in 2006, after the Supreme Court made another ground-breaking decision, ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (PDF) that the Military Commission trial system was illegal, they compounded the error by passing the Military Commissions Act (MCA), which revived the Commissions, further stripped the prisoners of their habeas rights, and, for good measure, reinforced the President’s right to seize and detain anyone he regarded as an “enemy combatant” (PDF).

These failings were only finally addressed in June 2008, when, in a third significant decision regarding Guantánamo (Boumediene v. Bush), the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had constitutional habeas corpus rights. Six and a half years after Guantánamo opened, this ruling finally meant that the prisoners’ cases would be heard in a US court. This was a belated triumph for justice (although both the Bush and Obama administrations have since done all in their power to delay the progress of the habeas cases), but it was not enough to undo the damage that had already been done.

For most of the prisoners released from Guantánamo, it was politics rather than justice that secured their freedom. The lawyers’ struggles, and the interventions of the judiciary, were enormously significant, but when it came down to it, public pressure in the prisoners’ home countries, and diplomatic pressure exerted by their home governments, played a more significant role. The real failure lay with Congress, which capitulated when confronted by an Executive branch that regarded its influence with disdain, and, it must be said, with the American public, who were prepared to let their President and Vice President seize dictatorial powers, undermine the US Constitution, shred the Geneva Conventions, spurn habeas corpus, tear up the Bill of Rights, discard the Army Field Manual, create a system of show trials for terrorists out of thin air, spy on American citizens with impunity, and pour scorn on the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

A version of this article was written for Freedom Daily, the monthly magazine of the Future of Freedom Foundation, and was published in its April 2009 issue. On August 13, it was made available on the FFF website.

In 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), and declared that it marked “a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment,” the commitment of the United States to eradicating the use of torture was made clear, as were the terms of reference regarding the meaning of torture.

As defined in Article 1 of the Convention, torture means “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person,” whether to secure information or a confession, as punishment, or as intimidation or coercion of any kind. There are, moreover, no excuses for this absolute prohibition to be broken. As Article 2 states, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

After the 9/11 attacks, however, when senior officials in the Bush administration, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, declared a “War on Terror,” they also decided that numerous national and international laws and treaties — including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture — were an inconvenience, which prevented them from seizing prisoners and interrogating them as they saw fit. As a result, prisoners in the “War on Terror” were held neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, but as “enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

Having deprived prisoners of any rights, it was then just a small step for the administration to decide that the torture ban was also irrelevant, and in the summer of 2002, senior officials commissioned lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (which interprets the law as it applies to the Executive branch), to redefine torture so narrowly that the President would be able to claim, as he did repeatedly, that America “does not torture.”

The OLC’s conclusions were contained in an infamous memo — known as the “torture memo” (PDF) — that was issued on August 1, 2002, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, but largely written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the OLC. According to Yoo, for torture to be committed, the pain inflicted must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or the infliction of mental pain which “result[s] in significant psychological harm of significant duration e.g. lasting for months or even years.”

This specific wording was chosen so that a number of techniques that were already being used on at least one “high-value detainee” — Abu Zubaydah, the gatekeeper of a military training camp in Afghanistan, who was regarded by the US government as a significant al-Qaeda operative — could be defended, even though there was, in fact, no justification whatsoever for unilaterally rewriting Article 1 of the UN Convention, and ignoring Article 2 altogether.

The most notorious of these techniques is waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, and it was a sign of the administration’s arrogance that senior officials felt justified in using the technique, even though it has a long and well-chronicled history as a form of torture. The Spanish Inquisition — more honest than the Bush administration — referred to it as “tortura del agua,” and in January, when Eric Holder was confirmed as Attorney General, he stated unequivocally, “Waterboarding is torture,” and noted, as the New York Times described it, that “waterboarding had been used to torment prisoners during the Inquisition, by the Japanese in World War II and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.” Perhaps most crucially, he also explained, “We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam.”

However, although the use of waterboarding has, in many ways, been the focus of media and public interest in the Bush administration’s use of torture, it is, in fact, just the most extreme example of an approach to torture that permeated every aspect of the Bush administration’s detention policies in the “War on Terror,” and was found not only in the “black sites” — the secret, CIA-run prisons for “high-value detainees” — but also in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo.

Last December, after a two and a half year investigation into the treatment of prisoners in the “War on Terror,” the Senate Armed Services Committee produced a damning report (PDF), implicating senior officials, from President Bush down, for implementing systemic abuse. As the report’s authors explained,

The abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

The Committee focused in particular on the reverse engineering of techniques “considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions,” and drawn largely from torture techniques used on captured US personnel in the Korean War to extract false confessions, which are taught in the US military’s SERE schools (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to enable US personnel to resist interrogation if captured. Despite being designed to produce false confessions, these techniques formed the basis for the Bush administration’s post-9/11 treatment of prisoners, and, in addition to waterboarding, included “stripping detainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures.”

Opposition to the use of these techniques, from agencies including the FBI and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, has been well-chronicled over the years, as has a leaked November 2004 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which concluded that the procedures were “tantamount to torture.” Moreover, it is clear that the widespread implementation of these techniques — in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Guantánamo, where a former interrogator told the New York Times that they were applied to “about one in six” of the prisoners (in other words, at least a hundred men) — and the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” on a number of “high-value detainees” means that the senior officials who authorized their use should be prosecuted, according to the laws of the United States.

However, these are not the only techniques whose use amounts to torture, and on the International Day In Support of Victims of Torture, as I join calls for Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the responsibility of senior officials in the Bush administration for implementing the use of torture and committing war crimes, I would like to remind readers that, although President Obama swept into office ordering an end to the use of torture, his wavering over the closure of Guantánamo has meant that another aspect of the Bush administration’s torture regime — the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantánamo — remains in place.

Hunger strikes have punctuated Guantánamo’s long and ignoble history, and, since January 2006, in response to a prison-wide hunger strike, the authorities’ have fastened long-term hunger strikers into restraint chairs twice a day, and have force-fed them through tubes inserted into the stomachs through the nose, even though, as Clive Stafford Smith, the lawyer for several dozen Guantánamo prisoners, has explained, “Medical ethics tell us that you cannot force-feed a mentally competent hunger striker, as he has the right to complain about his mistreatment, even unto death.”

And yet, even as this process began, the UN Commission on Human Rights concluded, in a detailed report about Guantánamo in February 2006 (PDF), following an 18-month investigation, that “[t]he excessive violence used in many cases during transportation … and forced-feeding of detainees on hunger strike must be assessed as amounting to torture,” and it is clear that nothing has changed in the three years since the report was published. Instead, five long-term hunger strikers have died at the prison, and official reports that they committed suicide have persistently been challenged. In the most recent case — that of Muhammad Salih, a Yemeni who died just three weeks ago — former prisoner Binyam Mohamed explained in the Miami Herald on June 11 that his death defied logic, and wondered whether he had been “killed by US personnel — intentionally or otherwise,” or whether he had died because of “some type of organ failure,” as a result of “the years of hunger strikes (since 2005) in protest against unjustified incarceration.”

Two weeks ago, I produced a report, “Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation” (PDF), for the British human rights group Cageprisoners about the effect of the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, in which, by analyzing a series of documents detailing the prisoners’ weights (which were released by the Pentagon in 2007), I was able to demonstrate the effects of arbitrary, and apparently endless imprisonment without charge or trial, which, in my opinion, is itself a form of torture. What I discovered shocked me, as the Pentagon’s own figures revealed that, at various times between between January 2002 and February 2007, 80 prisoners in Guantánamo (or one in ten of the total number of prisoners held) weighed less than 112 pounds, and 20 of those weighed less than 98 pounds.

If photos of the men were available, I have no doubt that there would be international uproar about conditions in Guantánamo, but in the absence of photos I’d like to conclude by quoting from a recent article by law professor Scott Horton, who wrote, in his column for Harper’s, that there was an aspect of Muhammad Salih’s death “that US officials are particularly anxious to avoid discussing: it appears to be tied to practices that the Pentagon defends as ‘force-feeding’ but other officials decry as ‘torture.’” He continued:

Pentagon officials seem extremely eager not to be associated with it or to be quoted defending it, particularly if they are health care professionals. There’s a good reason for that. The techniques do not comply with the international standards for actual force-feeding, established in the World Medical Association’s Malta Declaration of 1991. Instead they have a darker and more distressing progeny. From the use of restraint chairs down to the specific brand of commercial diet supplement used by the doctors, the force-feeding techniques now in use at Guantánamo replicate the methods used by the CIA at black sites under Bush. At the black sites, those methods were not part of any medical regime. Instead, they were a part of a carefully designed torture regime, the very same regime that Obama claims to have abolished in his first executive order.

Horton concluded by asking if this torture regime had just claimed another life. No answer has been forthcoming from the administration, but for anyone concerned with eradicating the use of torture by the United States, the truth about the force-feeding regime at Guantánamo should lead to renewed pressure on the White House to close Guantánamo as swiftly as possible, and to repatriate, or find new homes for the majority of the prisoners, who, like Muhammad Salih, were never the terrorists that the Bush administration apparently had in mind when it established Guantánamo in the first place.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the use of torture by the CIA, on “high-value detainees,” and in the secret prisons, see: Guantánamo’s tangled web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, dubious US convictions, and a dying man (July 2007), Jane Mayer on the CIA’s “black sites,” condemnation by the Red Cross, and Guantánamo’s “high-value” detainees (including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) (August 2007), Waterboarding: two questions for Michael Hayden about three “high-value” detainees now in Guantánamo (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo Charged with 9/11 Murders: Why Now? And What About the Torture? (February 2008), The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Confirms FBI’s Doubts (April 2008), Guantánamo Trials: Another Torture Victim Charged (Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, July 2008), Secret Prison on Diego Garcia Confirmed: Six “High-Value” Guantánamo Prisoners Held, Plus “Ghost Prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (August 2008), Will the Bush administration be held accountable for war crimes? (December 2008), The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part One) and The Ten Lies of Dick Cheney (Part Two) (December 2008), Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers (March 2009), Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives (March 2009), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One), Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two), 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah? and CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months before DoJ Approval, Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low (all April 2009), Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (May 2009, and follow the links for further articles about al-Libi). Also see the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.

For other stories discussing the use of torture in secret prisons, see: An unreported story from Guantánamo: the tale of Sanad al-Kazimi (August 2007), Rendered to Egypt for torture, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni is released from Guantánamo (September 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), and also see the extensive Binyam Mohamed archive. And for other stories discussing torture at Guantánamo and/or in “conventional” US prisons in Afghanistan, see: The testimony of Guantánamo detainee Omar Deghayes: includes allegations of previously unreported murders in the US prison at Bagram airbase (August 2007), Guantánamo Transcripts: “Ghost” Prisoners Speak After Five And A Half Years, And “9/11 hijacker” Recants His Tortured Confession (September 2007), The Trials of Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s “child soldier” (November 2007), Former US interrogator Damien Corsetti recalls the torture of prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib (December 2007), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), Sami al-Haj: the banned torture pictures of a journalist in Guantánamo (April 2008), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani, January 2009), Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Forgotten in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer (March 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009) and the extensive archive of articles about the Military Commissions.