By William Blum
They told us this was one of the world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court).
"If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1]
Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that almost anyone was fair game.
Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds.
Many others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a "terrorist organization", as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political.
It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2]
Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running," General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.[3]
Thousands of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly good reason. The world media has been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for five very long years. Said Guantánamo's former commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes we just didn't get the right folks."[4] Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact "the right folks".
Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like many others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American terrorist training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps". Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda and retaliating against American imperialism while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.
It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups -- which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight -- are on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras' actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5] The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington's agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.[7]
The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies.
Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp's residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries.
"There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it's hard to understand why the people are still there," said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. "We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn't just random. But we didn't find it."
The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle East country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes "involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports." With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: "This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a name found on one of the hard drives."
Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of their activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.[8]
When Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."[9]
Never mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into solitary confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. And two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you torture these officials, they might admit that it "torture lite".)
"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a senior American defense official said in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."[10]
When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?
Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell's 1984 "three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism."
William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir, Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire. Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Notes:-
[1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007
[2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11
[3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004
[4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005
[5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985
[6] ABC News, April 3, 2007
[7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007
[8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007
[9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo", Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006.
[10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10
No comments:
Post a Comment