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Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger StrikersIn 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed the U.N. 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 CAT, 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 of 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 U.N. Convention Against Torture — were an inconvenience that 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 U.S. 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 U.N. 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 honestly 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 U.S. 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 U.S. personnel in the Korean War to extract false confessions, which are taught in the U.S. military’s SERE schools (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) to enable U.S. 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 U.N. 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 a journalist and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press). Visit his blog here. Tags: accountability
The Tale of Two Tortured TeenagersThis is a guest column by Andy Worthington, journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (Pluto Press). Visit his blog here.
Yesterday, as Barack Obama prepared for his inauguration, and even though George W. Bush has already made his last speech to the nation, hearings resumed at Guantánamo in the cases of a number of prisoners facing trial by Military Commission, the novel and much-criticized system of trials for terror suspects that was conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. According to some reports, President Obama will call a halt to the Commissions within days of taking power, as his team prepares to review the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners, to decide who can be freed and who will be transferred to the mainland to face a trial in a federal court. I sincerely hope that this is the case, but in the meantime it appears to be business as usual at Guantánamo. Yesterday’s cases involved the last scheduled pre-trial hearing in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian prisoner who was seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, and a mental competency hearing in the case of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of five prisoners accused of planning or supporting the 9/11 attacks. As bin al-Shibh’s four alleged co-conspirators, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were also in the courtroom, the world’s media took more of an interest in the trials than usual. They joined a small number of regular reporters, as well as relatives of victims of the attacks, who were flown in by the Pentagon in an effort to shore up the last tattered remnants of the Commissions’ legitimacy. In truth, however, the game is up. Last week, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former prosecutor who left the Commissions in September, after explaining that he changed from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived” when he discovered that the system was both unwilling and incapable of providing the defense teams with exculpatory evidence, submitted an extraordinary declaration in the ACLU’s habeas corpus petition on behalf of the Afghan prisoner Mohammed Jawad. Vandeveld’s declaration exposed, in excruciating detail, how the Commissions’ prosecution office was “chaotic,” and how only a combination of luck and diligence led to his discovery that Jawad was almost certainly not responsible for the grenade attack on two U.S. soldiers and an Afghan translator, for which he was charged, and was, instead, a dirt-poor refugee who was tricked into joining an insurgent group and was drugged at the time of the attack. Like Omar Khadr, Jawad was a juvenile when seized, and according to the Optional Protocol to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), to which the U.S. has been a signatory since January 23, 2003, both young men should have been cared for through physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration, rather than being put forward as the first juveniles to face war crimes charges in the United States since the Second World War. Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s declaration was not the only blow to the Commissions last week. In an even more damaging incident, Susan Crawford, the Commissions’ Convening Authority, who is responsible for overseeing the trial system and deciding who is to be charged, admitted that she had refused to proceed with a trial last year in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi suspected of trying and failing to become one of the 9/11 attackers, because he had been tortured. “We tortured Qahtani,” she told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture.” This extraordinary admission — the first by a senior administration official — is so significant that it immediately became apparent that, under the terms of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is also a signatory, President Obama will be obliged to pursue those responsible for war crimes. Moreover, while it has been apparent since a log of al-Qahtani’s interrogation was released in 2005 (PDF) that his 50-day ordeal in late 2002 and early 2003 was indeed torture, the techniques to which he was subjected did not include waterboarding, an ancient torture technique involving controlled drowning, which was reserved for the supposedly “high-value detainees,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri. Al-Qahtani was, rather subjected to a combination of other techniques that were applied to over a hundred other prisoners in Guantánamo. As a Senate Armed Services Committee report concluded last month (PDF), these techniques, which 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,” were partly derived from techniques used by Chinese Communists in the Korean war to produce false confessions. Taught in U.S. military schools as part of a program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which was designed to teach U.S. personnel how to resist interrogation if captured, the techniques were reverse engineered for use in the “War on Terror” with baleful results. As the Committee explained: The abuse of detainees in U.S. 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. It remains to be seen how far-reaching the effects of Crawford’s confession will be, as the use of torture has infected every aspect of the detention policies instigated by the Bush administration in the “War on Terror,” but it is already clear that her words should have brought an end to the disgraceful pre-trial hearings that took place in Guantánamo yesterday.
In her interview, Crawford attempted to explain that she “let the charges go forward” in the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants “because the FBI satisfied her that they gathered information without using harsh techniques,” using so-called “clean teams” who gained fresh confessions without using torture. This is a ludicrous assertion, of course, as it ought to be apparent that a voluntary confession made by a torture victim may well be tainted by the original effects of the torture. Moreover, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are not the only prisoners put forward for trial by Military Commission who have been tortured in U.S. custody. Others include Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, who was charged last July, and another “high-value detainee,” Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was charged last March, and, as I reported in an article last March, Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi seized in Azerbaijan, who has claimed that he was tortured in the U.S. prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and Ibrahim al-Qosi, an alleged al-Qaeda operative. In December 2005, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, who was assigned to represent al-Qosi during the Commissions’ first incarnation (before the Supreme Court ruled them illegal in June 2006, and they were then revived by Congress), explained that she “characterized his treatment as possibly torture but certainly inhumane treatment; he was held in stress positions for protracted periods, subjected to military dogs and sexually humiliated.” When it comes to Mohammed Jawad and Omar Khadr, the two former juveniles facing trials, the situation is no better. Jawad’s Military Commissions judge has already dealt a devastating blow to the government’s case against Jawad by ruling that the only evidence against him — a confession made in Afghan custody after his capture in December 2002 — was the fruit of torture, and that a second confession, made hours later to U.S. forces, was produced under the effects of that torture. In addition, as was made clear in Lt. Col. Vandeveld’s declaration last week, Jawad was also subjected to abuse at Bagram airbase and at Guantánamo, where, over a two-week period in 2004, he was moved from cell to cell 112 times to prevent him from sleeping, under what was euphemistically termed the “frequent flier program,” but which, in the real world, would be known as prolonged sleep deprivation, which is itself a form of torture. Similar problems afflict the case of Omar Khadr, who was tortured from the moment he was taken into custody at Bagram, despite being severely wounded after the firefight that led to his capture. Amongst other cruelties, Khadr was refused any medication for his wounds, was hung from his wrists for long periods of time, and, as an article in Rolling Stone explained, was “ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet.” In Guantánamo his torture continued, when he was subjected to the reverse engineered SERE techniques. He told his lawyers that he was “short-shackled by his hands and feet to a bolt in the floor and left for five to six hours,” and that “occasionally a U.S. officer would enter the room to laugh at him.” He also said that he was “kept in extremely cold rooms,” “lifted up by the neck while shackled, and then dropped to the floor,” and “beaten by guards.” In one particularly notorious incident, the guards left him short-shackled until he urinated on himself, and then “poured a pine-scented cleaning fluid over him and used him as a ‘human mop’ to clean up the mess.” All this abuse took place even though, like Mohammed Jawad, Khadr was almost certainly not responsible for the main crime for which he was charged: killing a U.S. soldier with a hand grenade. In Khadr’s case, it was not until November 2007 that it became apparent that the prosecution had suppressed or even altered evidence that conflicted with the story that the Commissions were trying to sell: that Khadr was not a teenager but a terrorist. As the ACLU calls on Barack Obama to scrap the Military Commissions, and to call off the proposed trials of two young men who have been brutalized for over six years in U.S. custody when they should have been rehabilitated, I leave the last word to Damien Corsetti, a former U.S. interrogator at Bagram. Accused of abusing Ahmed al-Darbi, Corsetti was cleared of the charges, and has since become a fierce critic of the administration’s “War on Terror” detention policies. Today, as Corsetti arrived at Guantánamo to testify about what happened to Khadr at Bagram, where he was one of the few guards to befriend him, he explained to Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star, “I firmly believe it was torture and unfortunately I took part in it … I was a believer at one time, I was. I guess this is just me trying to make it a little bit right. You know? Maybe get some closure to it. We'll see.” Tags: Close Guantanamo |
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