How to Build a Human Bomb Guantanamo Bay is killing people thousands of miles away.
by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (May 13 2008 )
When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in
Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of
its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at
Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows
both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to
release the camp's prisoners {1}. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it
was to put them there in the first place.
Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least thirty former
Guantanamo detainees who have "taken part in anti-coalition militant
activities after leaving US detention" {2}. Given that the majority of the
inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were
detained, that's one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that
"anti-coalition militant activities" include talking to the media about
their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in
its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with
Michael Winterbottom's film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven
former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or
Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release.
One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects
well on the US government.
The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men "successfully lied to
US officials, sometimes for over three years". {3} The US government's
intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who
would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters
were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal
interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of
innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any
kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is
guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates,
they also deny justice to the world.
Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to
deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan {4}. He admitted
that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later
retracted this confession, which had been made "under pressure and threats"
{5}. When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over
to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence
required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his
interrogators had signed his supposed testimony {6}. The Kuwaiti courts,
without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.
All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA's other detention
centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is
extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for
producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop.
Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a
wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at the highest
levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners
what they want to hear.
In his book Torture Team (2008), Philippe Sands describes the treatment of
Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities
(like half a dozen other suspects) as "the twentieth hijacker". By the time
his interrogators started using "enhanced techniques" to extract information
from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell
permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he "was talking
to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a
corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end" {7}. He was
sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further
54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted
from a man in this state?
The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict
after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but
were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing
himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in
Guantanamo Bay. "Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the
reality of the Americans and what those infidels want", he said {8}. He
claimed he was beaten, drugged and "used for experiments" and that "the
Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the
Koran and threw it in dirty places" {9}. Al-Ajmi's lawyer revealed that his
arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from
praying {10}.
The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that
would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published
a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him
on his arrival with these words. "Do you know what the Germans did to the
Jews? That's exactly what we're going to do with you." There were certain
similarities. "I knew a man from Morocco", Kurnaz writes, "who used to be a
ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of
frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would
amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came
back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs."
The young man - scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz's had
just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a
coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered
in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he
tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard
would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner,
he was routinely beaten by the camp's Immediate Reaction Force, and taken
away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more {11}.
Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers.
The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of
sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense
Intelligence Agency says, "maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a
farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's going to come out a
fully fledged jihadist." {12}
In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings,
extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United
Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is
that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and
prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates
evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a
process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty
from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives,
this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the
ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the
world more dangerous.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide
Attack. Washington Post.
2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees who
have returned to the fight.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/d20070712formergtmo.pdf
3. ibid
4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants
at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of Defense, No date
given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence. Pages 8-9 of the pdf
file. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/000201-000299.pdf#38
5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative Review
Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf.
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/ARB_Transcript_Set_17_22822-23051.pdf#466.
6. No author given, 26th May 2006. Five ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in
Kuwait. Associated Press.
7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of
American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008.
8. Quoted by Alissa J Rubin, 9th May 2008. Bomber's Final Messages Exhort
Fighters Against US. New York Times.
9. ibid
10. Ben Fox, 7th May 2008. Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack. Associated
Press.
11. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in
Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008.
12. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. Using terror to fight terror.
The Observer. Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/13/how-to-build-a-human-bomb/
How to Build a Human Bomb
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