Keeping Track...

Guantanamo: Beyond The Law

ABOUT THIS SERIES
An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

The Costs Of Torture...

Guantánamo guards suffer psychological trauma

...

Amnesty International UK spokesperson Neil Durkin pointed out that the psychological trauma inflicted on the Guantánamo inmates should not be overlooked. "With numerous suicide attempts and reports of Guantánamo prisoners on the edge of psychosis, we are extremely concerned that even those eventually released from the camp will be mentally scarred for the rest of their lives," he said. "Over 200 of the Guantánamo prisoners are now held in solitary confinement - and after years of detention without charge or trial this is taking a heavy toll."

There have been few scientific studies of the psychological effects of working as a prison guard, but classic experiments in the 1960s and 1970s showed how easy it is to prompt ordinary people to perpetrate extremely cruel acts given the right conditions.

In the so-called 'Stanford prison experiment' in 1971, college students were asked to act out roles as guards and detainees in a mock prison in the basement of the university's psychology department. Both groups quickly adapted to their roles and the guards became increasingly sadistic and cruel in their treatment of the prisoners. The results were so shocking the experiment was stopped early.

"It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches," the experiment's author Dr Philip Zimbardo is quoted as saying on the American Psychological Association's website.

Also,

Only Connect

Last week I received an email from a dear friend. The email came from Sweden, on Valentine’s Day. I have spent the better part of this week trying to craft a response. I have failed. This post is my attempt at a response.

This blog is anti-torture. There is a logo on the sidebar of this blog that declares the unequivocal position of this blog and its author. Being anti-torture seems to me to be a commonsense position to hold. It is however not a position that is universally held. There are torturers in this world and there are those who aid and abet the torturers. Then there are the victims. My friend, Tasneem Khalil, is a torture victim.

...

These are among the many costs of torture...

Read both stories.

Oh Dear...

Rigged Trials at Gitmo

When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes -- the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, something that had lent great credibility to the proceedings.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals, we've got to have convictions.'"

(Hat'tip to the War Room)

"I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it"

AP confirms secret camp inside Gitmo By ANDREW O. SELSKY

For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided a few details about the maximum-security lockup.

Camp 7 hunh? A sooper-dooper sekrit facility.

Awoogadaboogadaboogada!

PHEAR!

Heh...

Army Col. Larry James, whose team of psychologists assists interrogators, said he does not want to know where Camp 7 is.

"I learned a long, long time ago, if I'm going to be successful in the intel community, I'm meticulously — in a very, very dedicated way — going to stay in my lane," he said. "So if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."

Hrrrm...

Why I'm Leaving APA

*** APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is not true, specifically that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists into a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

"So if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it."

-- Army Col. Larry James (whose team of psychologists assists interrogators)

Well, there goes that excuse...

Heh...

Wow...

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama

More than 80 volunteer lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees today endorsed Illinois Senator Barack Obama's presidential bid.

The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to "restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community." The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.

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Several Boston lawyers were among the signatories to the endorsement statement, including P. Sabin Willett, Stephen H. Oleskey, Jason Pinney, and Neil McGaraghan. Other names on the list included Washington lawyer Thomas Wilner, retired federal appeals court judge John Gibbons, Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, and retired Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy's top JAG officer from 2000 to 2002 and who is now the dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh.

From he joint statement itself:

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Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration's efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration's bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo. He has understood that our strength as a nation stems from our commitment to our core values, and that we are strong enough to protect both our security and those values. Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates.

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Wow...

Just wow...

Again a little late...

I should have posted this before... Anyway I think this whole thing needs to be reproduced in full:

http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=23086

A Letter from Guantánamo
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17/01/2008



Today, the Associated Press reports on a letter from Guantánamo written by al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj. The letter is dated December 27, 2007, and has just been declassified by the Pentagon’s censors. It was translated from the Arabic by his lawyers at the London-based legal charity Reprieve, which represents dozens of the Guantánamo detainees.



Mr. al-Haj was captured by Pakistani forces, acting on behalf of the United States, in December 2001, as he prepared to resume the Arabic TV station’s coverage of Afghanistan with the rest of his team. As Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, explained after visiting him at Guantánamo last September, he was seized “because the US thought he had filmed al-Jazeera’s famous [Osama] bin Laden interview. As has so often been the case of late, the US was wrong (though name me a journalist who would turn down a bin Laden scoop).”



In Guantánamo, Mr. al-Haj has been subjected to an extraordinary array of vague allegations for which the administration has failed to provide any evidence. At his administrative review in September 2006, it was alleged that he had transported $220,000 to Azerbaijan “for what he was told was told was a humanitarian mission which instead was destined for Chechen rebels,” and that, when he worked for a company called the Union Beverage Company, he “interacted with the individual in charge of distribution of juice in Azerbaijan,” who “was under investigation for possible ties to terrorism.”



Referring to his first assignment in Afghanistan with al-Jazeera, the authorities also decided that interviews allegedly conducted by Mr. al-Haj and a co-worker with “the Treasury Minister of the Taliban, the Minister of Electricity, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs,” and with “a man who identified himself as a member of the al-Qaeda (sic)” constituted a connection or an association with terrorism. Throughout his detention, other claims – including an allegation that he “arranged for the transport of a Stinger anti-aircraft system from Afghanistan to Chechnya” – have been dropped from the “evidence” against him.



Confirming that these allegations are nothing more than a smokescreen, the authorities in Guantánamo have focused almost exclusively on Mr. al-Haj’s association with al-Jazeera. In an interview with Democracy Now on January 15, his younger brother, Asim, spoke to Amy Goodman from Khartoum, and explained that his brother is “a victim of a political operation against al-Jazeera, which Washington does not approve of.” He added that, throughout the 130 interrogations to which he has been subjected in Guantánamo, “the interrogations were all about al-Jazeera and alleged relations between al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda. They tried to induce him to work as a spy for American intelligence in return for US citizenship for him and for his family and to help him even write a book, on the condition that he would spy on his colleagues at al- Jazeera. For example, if you look at the allegation that he was involved in sales of rockets or missiles to Afghanistan, I mean, how could a reporter or a media person traveling to a country he’s never been to before carry this? Would he carry these in his luggage or what?”



In Guantánamo, Mr. al-Haj has been a tireless campaigner for justice. He has been prominent in campaigns demanding that the detainees be freed or subjected to a fair trial, and has provided detailed information (declassified by the Pentagon) about his fellow detainees, and about the various hunger strikes that have plagued the administration.



As a result of his principled stand, Mr. al-Haj is regarded with particular suspicion by the authorities, and has been subjected to appalling treatment over the years. In despair at the treatment not only of himself, but of all the other detainees, he embarked on a hunger strike on January 7, 2007, and has now gone without food for 374 days. The authorities’ response to the hunger strikes has been brutal, as Clive Stafford Smith explained in October. “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,” Stafford Smith wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “But the Pentagon knows that a prisoner starving himself to death would be abysmal PR, so they force-feed Sami. As if that were not enough, when Gen. Bantz J. Craddock headed up the US Southern Command, he announced that soldiers had started making hunger strikes less ‘convenient.’ Rather than leave a feeding tube in place, they insert and remove it twice a day. Have you ever pushed a 43-inch tube up your nostril and down into your throat? Tonight, Sami will suffer that for the 479th time.”



Stafford Smith also noted a serious decline in his client’s mental and physical health, and is worried that he may die in Guantánamo. “Sami looked very thin,” he wrote in October. “His memory is disintegrating, and I worry that he won’t survive if he keeps this up. He already wrote a message for his 7-year-old son, Mohammed, in case he dies here.” On Democracy Now, his brother added, “if Sami dies, who will be responsible for this? And to who would we … if we were to file suit, that would be against whom? The most difficult thing for a human being is to be subject to injustice against which you cannot do anything, for yourself or for in support of others.”



In the hope of providing a small gesture to keep the plight of Sami al-Haj in the public eye, I reproduce the full text of his letter below.



Sami al-Haj’s letter from Guantánamo, December 27, 2007



It is with great pleasure that I pass on my warmest greetings and gratitude for all your efforts in regards to the case of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Also I would like to pass on our wishes for the New Year and asking God to make it a successful and prosperous one.



As for our news, we remain here for more than six years, and we still seek to proclaim truth, freedom and world peace.



All of this takes place in a world which knows what is happening but remains silent and does little more than watch this sorry theatre.



By now, surely everyone knows that truth. The US was the country that prided itself by bringing peace; now, sadly, instead it rains down violence and discord. Guantánamo is the most obvious example of this.



We prisoners entered Guantánamo alive, many have left it alive, and some of us remain in it, seemingly alive ourselves. However, those who remain die every second of every day that we are here. Each of us suffers new physical pain, and our injured hearts suffer from a psychological pain that can not be described.



All of this happens and the world remains silent. And, as it has been written, it is true of us:



I am alive and will listen if you call

But there will soon be no life for us who you call;

And if you blew at the embers now they would light up

But wait and you will find that you blow into ashes

Sami al-Haj



For further information about Sami al-Haj, and about the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. Click here for the campaign to free Sami al-Haj.



SOURCE: www.andyworthington.co.uk