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Defending freedom by fighting terror with a war on liberty
• Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
By Clive Stafford Smith
Phoenix (paperback £8.99)
WHAT this book exposes about Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror will terrify you: Thousands of civilians, including children and old men, disappeared; barbaric torture methods dating to the Spanish Inquisition, and blanket immunity for the perpetrators.
Meanwhile, right under our noses, legal cornerstones like human rights, habeas corpus, jury trial and judicial scrutiny are in mortal danger.
Civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, an Anglo-American, has represented several Guantanamo Bay prisoners. He’d already made a name for himself and his charity, Reprieve, defending clients on America’s Death Row. But what he uncovered shocked him.
British resident Binyam Ahmed Mohamed was seized in the wake of Afghanistan war. A young Ethiopian who’d fled to London in the mid-1990s and turned to religion to help kick a drug habit, he’d gone to Afghanistan before the war, probably worked up by heady mix of religious nationalism and an urge to find sanctuary in a drug-free, highly religious society. When he fled the war he was picked up on a passport irregularity by Pakistani secret cops, tortured and passed to American agents who sent him to Morocco for more abuse.
He was given fearsome beatings, hundreds of razor cuts to his body and genitals, was force-fed heroin and had his brain softened up using headphones taped to his ears blasting violent rap and heavy-metal music at top-volume, for 24 hours-a-day, months on end. In Britain, British agents interrogated friends, family and, astonishingly as he was a bachelor, a woman they claimed was his “wife”. Implicated in a “confession” tortured out of a man he’d never met, he was accused of plotting to explode a radioactive dirty-bomb over New York.
The case was quietly dropped amid suggestions the whole thing was a scare story to work up the War on Terror, but Binyam was refused an open trial. Instead a military tribunal was abruptly stopped when it became politically embarrassing and he remains in a secret lock-
up.
Other Britons and British residents represented by Stafford Smith, like Shaker Amer and Moazzem Begg, have been returned after years of torture but still await an explanation.
Most of the Guantanamo prisoners were probably ordinary people, Afghani children of 11 and old men in their eighties, taxi drivers and farmers, who through misfortune, naivety or stupidity, found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time and were sold to America for a bounty. Countless others were shipped to Arab, African or Asian countries for extreme torture. Some, like Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj, crippled in Guantanamo, were targeted.
Torture was approved at the top level and is supported by a majority of Americans, egged on by the media which stresses that faced with a terrorist outrage, a “ticking time-bomb”, torture is necessary.
Stafford-Smith debunks the myth asking “time-bomb” advocates to name a single historical example – they can’t, and highlighting torture “confessions” like Saddam Hussein was in league with Al-Qaeda – used to buttress the case for war in Iraq, and hoaxes such as the New York dirty bomb and the Manchester United stadium bomb (remember that? It was used in Guantanamo interrogations). So there’s hardly a need for experts to warn him intelligence gathered under torture is almost valueless – that a person will say anything
if the electrodes are tight enough, and that an enemy quickly changes its plans after its people are captured.
But Guantanamo’s just the tip of the iceberg, the most open of America’s secret gulags. It admits to holding 40,000 prisoners, including 24,000 in Iraq and 14,000 in secret gaols around the world – some run with the connivance of European governments, including ours. One of the most important is in the remote British colony of Diego Garcia. America subcontracts Asian, African and Arab regimes to carry out its torture so it can officially have
clean hands.
Prisons like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are supposed to demoralise and intimidate “enemy” populations, conveying the message resistance is futile, while stoking the sense of being under siege among voters back home.
But Stafford-Smith’s unperturbed . He’s sympathetic to the Guantanamo soldiers (who salute officers with “Honour Bound!”, to which the officer snaps back, “To defend freedom!”), and optimistic the legal system is not beyond redemption, that the Nuremburg Trials in the aftermath of World War Two prove there’s a better way than secret prisons in the War on Terror.
It’s not easy to be so upbeat. So far, the law and the media have willingly gone along with the War on Terror, perhaps better dubbed the War on Liberty, and it may soon be the rest of us who need saving from its consequences.
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