Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan's scorching description of Guantánamo as "the gulag of our times" has provoked a new White House line: Stories of torture and mistreatment of terror detainees are the fabrications of repatriated ex-prisoners who "hate America" and are trained to lie, as George W. Bush declared at a May 31 press conference. [. . . ] For three and a half years, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other monitoring groups, frustrated by official stonewalling, have maintained a cautious approach to torture allegations. It has taken repeated breaches in the Administration's wall of secrecy--through investigative reporting, the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act requests and court orders--to document the patterns Amnesty describes. And scarcely a week goes by without further r supporting evidence. Just days before Bush's remarks, the New York Times detailed cover-ups in the sadistic killings of two prisoners at Bagram. No sooner did Newsweek, under Pentagon pressure, retract its Koran-desecration story than reports of Koran desecrations emerged from the Defense Department's own records. Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that he "never approved" the use of intensive sleep deprivation, guard dogs and excessive noise in interrogations at Abu Ghraib. Now the latest document cache obtained by the ACLU includes a memo over Sanchez's signature, dated September 14, 2003, explicitly approving techniques for "significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee"--including (surprise!) sleep deprivation, noise and "presence of military working dogs." [ . . . ] Guantánamo's hundreds do not compare with Stalin's millions, but the gulag is a fair analogy--how else to describe an international network of cells and interrogation centers holding prisoners without charge, for indeterminate terms, beyond reach of any court? But Bush's torture system and his obsession with secret executive authority are shaped by the contradictions of democracy: courts that won't cooperate, legislators who ask questions, reporters who drag secrets into the light. Harnessing those forces--whether through Congressional committees, new legal actions or citizen protests--is today's great task.Next, from a piece by Gary Leupp posted June 3rd to Counterpunch. Responding to the comments of Bush and Cheney about the Amnesty report as “absurd”, Leupp observes,
Those of us in the reality-based community are not inclined to dismiss an Amnesty International report out of hand. I myself am sometimes disappointed with Amnesty International, especially when they accuse certain organizations I respect of human rights violations on a par with those of the governments they seek to topple. I think it necessary to distinguish between the violence of the oppressed and the violence of the oppressor. One is "political" whether one so distinguishes or not, and Amnesty International's politics tends towards the legitimatization of state power over the right to rebel. In any case, the organization does a lot of good work, [. . . ]. Only fools would call their reports "absurd," not to be taken seriously. [ . . . ] William Schultz, head of Amnesty's U.S. Section, responds that it is "worth noting that this administration never finds it 'absurd' when we criticize Cuba or China, or when we condemned the violations in Iraq under Saddam Hussein." Indeed U.S. administrations routinely reference Amnesty International reports when they want to attack some foreign foe. But the fascistic epistemology current in ruling circles dictates that truth cannot negatively affect the USA. Facts and intelligence must be fixed around U.S. Interests. [ . . . ] “ what Amnesty International says is true." The battle to determine what is slowly takes shape, as the implications of the lies so plainly spelled out in the Downing Street Memo and so many other documents impact those still awake among us. The Bush administration knowingly and willfully attacked a sovereign country, illegally, unprovoked, on the basis of deliberately manufactured lies, using the emotions produced by 9-11, general ignorance, and a compliant press to promote the cause.
Now a January 3rd posting to Counterpunch by Mike Whitney, for further reflections on the function of Guantanamo.
The prison facility at Guantanamo Bay is the brightest star in the Bush firmament. It towers over the political landscape like a monument to human cruelty. That's why the administration chose to slap it up in full view of the world. It's their way of announcing that the fundamental rules of the game have changed. [ . . .] There's no need for Guantanamo. The United States has plenty of experience concealing political prisoners from the public. The CIA has been transporting enemy suspects to hidden locations since its inception. Certainly, an increase of 600 prisoners or so wouldn't have caused much of a stir if they were tucked away in some remote corner[s] of the earth. But, that's not the purpose of Guantanamo. Guantanamo is intended to send a message that the internationally accepted norms of justice have been rescinded. From now on, all law proceeds from Washington. [ . . .] Guantanamo embodies the ethos of the Bush administration; an aggressive and inflexible dogma that regards force as the organizing principle of society. In this respect, Guantanamo is less notable as a jail than it is as a summary of a particular world view. In fact, the facility is a realization of the new world order; a chilling vision of oppression in brick-and-mortar. [ . . .] Guantanamo wasn't created to address the nebulous threat of global terrorism. [ ....] Rather, it was built to broadcast the launching of a global police state, administered by the United States and in brazen defiance of universally accepted standards of justice. [...] Guantanamo is the collaborative vision of American plutocrats who are close to the administration and who affect policy decisions through their respective think tanks and lobbyists. If that wasn't true, we would have heard squeals of protest echoing from every corner of the nation. Instead, (apart from a scattering of human rights groups and the ACLU) there's been hardly a peep from the country's elites. For the most part, "the privileged few" have no problem with a system that categorically denies its victims even minimal human rights. The disparity in wealth sadly disposes many of these plutocrats to more autocratic government. [ ....]. Guantanamo is not anomaly, but the full-flowering of the Bush ideology. [...] Guantanamo is the logical extension of the corporate system. It focuses on dispatching potential enemies with maximum efficiency. The prison's main architect, Secretary Rumsfeld, has tried to meet the requirements of global commerce by producing a precision model of detention; applying his [. . . ] sensibility for organization with a "top-down" business strategy that sidesteps all the burdensome laws of due process. He has, in fact, created the modern-day terror-camp, free from any legal encumbrances and operating with complete impunity. However horrible the crime, no one is ever held accountable [...]Whitney's view dovetails with Naomi Klein's comments from the May 30th issue of the Nation, in which she points out that
As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture. [ . . .] This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will. This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."While the Nation and Amnesty International have seen the Supreme Court's rulings on the cases Guantanamo detainees as positive signs setting limits on executive power, others are less sanguine. Jean-Claude Paye, writing in the May issue of Monthly Review, notes that the in the decision on the Rasul vs. Bush case affecting foreign nationals,
it would appear that the Supreme Court has not called into question the U.S. claim to punish at its total discretion those charged with the supposed offense of being “illegal combatants”—that is, of daring to oppose U.S. forces anywhere in the world. A trial merely gives the petitioner a chance to prove that he was “engaged [neither] in combat [n]or in acts of terrorism against the United States.”(that is, the onus is on the accused to prove innocence). In the case of Hamdi vs Rumsfeld, affecting US nationals detained at Guantanamo,
The ruling recognizes the executive’s power to incarcerate a U.S. citizen accused of terrorism without trial, and even without charges. However, unlike the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court does not sanction the unlimited detention of prisoners. It reaffirms “the fundamental nature of a citizen’s right to be free from involuntary confinement by his own government without due process of law.” The Court concluded that “although Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged here, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker.”(Again, the burden is placed on the detainee to contest the detention, rather than on the government to prove its justice. Moreover, the “narrow circumstances” of the current state of emergency are themselves left to the vagaries of executive decision). Although Paye discusses the opportunities these decisions might present, he stresses that
The “war against terrorism” has provided all executive branches of the leading Western governments with a perfect opportunity to make some deep adjustments to society. These changes are so far-reaching that they approach a shedding of the old political regime. We in the West are witnessing a reversal of the role of criminal procedure right across the board. Its usual function—to guarantee fundamental freedoms and cap the powers of police and government—is morphing into the opposite, a suspension of constitutional order. By extending exceptional proceedings to all stages of the criminal process—from inquiry to trial—private life is being invaded and the expression of public freedoms chilled.And he concludes,
A state of emergency that takes indefinite hold, and affects all public and private spheres, brings about a political sea change. It marks an end to the formal separation of powers, and gives the executive the kind of authority allotted to judges: the authority to state and interpret the law, the authoritarian power of dictatorship.
