A version of this
article appears
in issue 4/05 of
Index on
Censorship -
Reinventing
Russia.
From: Index on Censorship
Rumsfeld’s Archipelago of Gulags
Focus on Cuban camp obscured far worse activities around the world. By Clive Stafford Smith
For four years Guantánamo’s high profile obscured a far shadier world of US-sponsored interrogation chambers around the world, writes Clive Stafford Smith. Only now is the world finally asking about the archipelago of US prisons around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying prisoners from one torture chamber to the next.
The Guantánamo Bay welcome sign trumpets the base motto: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.’ Outside the base, on a visit to see my clients held in the prison, I watched a soldier smartly salute his superior: ‘Honor Bound, sir!’ The officer saluted his reply: ‘To Defend Freedom, soldier!’ I laughed. I thought they were joking.
The joke is on us. Guantánamo has been a decoy, drawing attention from a far shadier world of US-sponsored interrogation chambers. For four years, the stratagem worked quite effectively. The Bush administration blustered in response to global anger at the 'secret' Guantánamo prison.
Only now is the world finally asking about the archipelago of US prisons around the world, and the fleet of CIA aircraft ferrying prisoners from one torture chamber to the next.
Among his other sins, US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is an amateur philosopher. He has opined upon ‘The Unknown’: "As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
So let us assess: What do we know about the secret prisons of the US, and what is yet to surface?
First, who is being held and where? Rumsfeld announced that the Guantánamo prisoners were the ‘worst of the worst’, carefully culled from thousands captured on the Afghan battlefield; some were top al Qaida leaders and the rest were ‘amongst the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth’. All were ‘involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans’.
This is the first falsehood. We know the names of several important prisoners seized by the US in its War on Terror. The capture of at least eleven of Osama bin Laden's top generals has been advertised in the media: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi, Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, Waleed Mohammed bin Attash, Hassan Ghul, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and Abu Faraj al-Libbi.
We know that none of these big names is in Guantánamo. To be sure, there used to be a secret part of Guantánamo, and perhaps Abu Zubaydah and others were held there briefly. But this detention centre was closed in the summer of 2004, when the Supreme Court ruled that the writ of habeas corpus should be available to prisoners in Guantánamo. The rule of law had come disturbingly close to the Al Qaida generals, and they had to be moved out of its reach.
We also know that Guantánamo does not even house the second tier of terrorists. The military has published the names of the 'worst' Guantánamo prisoners, the nine (out of 500) who have been 'charged' in a military commission.
Top of the list is a Yemeni prisoner, Salim Hamdan, who the military says was Osama bin Laden's driver. Cast aside the fact that he denies the charge and let us assume his guilt. Cast aside the fact that 30 other people have also been identified as bin Laden's drivers; bin Laden apparently had many cars. What does it mean that the ultimately worst enemy of the US available in Guantánamo is a chauffeur?
Indeed, we know that a large proportion of the Guantánamo prisoners are not terrorists at all. A CIA officer has said that half the prisoners had nothing to do with any crime and the rest were, at most, footsoldiers.
Rumsfeld lied when he said the prisoners were captured on the Afghan battlefield. Two of my clients, Bisher al Rawi and Jamil el Banna, both British residents, were grabbed in the Gambia – further from Kabul than their homes in London. The majority of prisoners I represent were not seized in Afghanistan at all, but purchased in Pakistan for the bounties offered by the US – starting at US$5,000, 20 years' salary for many locals.
If Guantánamo houses no major member of al Qaida, two questions remain: first, how many 'ghost' prisoners are there? Second, where are these prisoners held?
Desperate families
The US has publicly acknowledged rendering 150 prisoners from one country to another to secret prisons. With as many as 80,000 prisoners passing through US hands in the four years post-9/11, and with scores of desperate families searching for their lost ones, it seems likely that the total number of the ‘disappeared’ is much higher. The US$64,000 question – and we know we don’t know the answer here – is what, when they have been shuttled from one secret prison to the next for a few years, the US plans to do with these prisoners.
As to the second question: word has gradually seeped out about an archipelago of secret US prisons. At one point, there were 20 US-sponsored detention centres in Afghanistan. Torture indubitably took place there, but those prisons are now under Afghan rather than US control because President Harmid Karzai cannot afford to play the puppet to President Bush any longer. Neither are these Afghan prisons secure: the US says that a number of significant prisoners escaped on 11 July, 2005.
The US turned to its allies in Europe for assistance in rendering prisoners, and holding them incommunicado without any legal rights – a clear violation of international law. Surprisingly, Germany comes top of the league table of shame, hosting more CIA planes (437) on their rendition missions than any other country.
Among others, Waleed bin Attash was allegedly held and interrogated in a US base on German soil, as one of my clients – his brother, who is held in Guantanamo Bay – has informed me. CIA planes have visited Britain at least 210 times, and in December, the BBC reported that some interrogations actually took place on British soil.
The ‘New European’ nations of Poland and Romania have, according to persistent reports, been even more receptive, hosting secret lawless enclaves for the CIA. But there are too many inquisitive journalists in Europe, which means that there are unlikely to be many secret US prisons in Europe in the longer term.
Meanwhile, there are truths yet to emerge: the German media has reported that Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo is one place that has been held. The huge US airbases in Germany may not have given up their prisoners yet either.
Yet another December leak, to ABC news, revealed that the 11 named Al Qaida generals have already been moved from Eastern Europe to ‘a new CIA facility in the North African desert’. Where might this be in the rendition merry-go-round? There are various repressive Middle Eastern governments who have blindly done the US bidding these past four years.
For example, before he got to Guantánamo, the CIA took my client Binyam Mohammed, a British resident who lived in Kensington, to Morocco on July 21 2002. During the ensuing 18 months, he had a razor blade repeatedly taken to his penis. Naturally, he said whatever they wanted to hear, but at one point he did ask his abusers why they were doing this.
‘America's really pissed off at what happened,’ a guard replied. ‘And they've said to the world, either you're with us or you're against us. We Moroccans say we're with [the US]. So we'll do whatever they want. They want revenge for everyone who died on 9/11.’
Unconfirmed reports suggest that Morocco may be the current residence of the Al Qaida generals. Indeed, it is quite an ally who will razor-blade prisoners for a friend. But Morocco is not a reliable long-term torturer. The King has been trying to clean up Morocco's international image of late, and when Binyam inevitably sues the King and his colleagues under the Torture Convention, they will probably rethink their position.
The Syrians have worked with (or on) prisoners rendered by the CIA. For example, Maher Arar, a Canadian, was stopped in transit in JFK airport in New York, and rendered to Syria where he spent 10 months in a tiny isolation cell called ‘The Grave’, intermittently beaten with frayed cables. Yet Syria can hardly be considered the ideal partners in crime, as President Bush periodically threatens to invade them.
Egypt has been useful in the past, but has irritatingly independent journalists, and is experiencing a troubling tendency toward democracy and openness. Several prisoners have been rendered there for torture, including Mamduh Habib, who went through their electric shock programme. But Egypt may be unwilling to house a fully-fledged CIA prison.
Juveniles in detention
Jordan was nominated by the Los Angeles Times ‘as a hub for extraordinary renditions’, and has been a close collaborator. Sadly, the US is attracted by the repressive nature of its government, but the CIA is likely to be deterred by the sieve-like quality of its prisons.
One of our Guantánamo clients was first rendered to Jordan as a juvenile for 16 months of torture. He persuaded a guard to take a message to his family; the guard later accepted a bribe for other services rendered. The problem, from the CIA perspective, is that too many Arabs in the Middle East are sympathetic to the CIA's Arab prisoners – in the wake of Abu Ghraib, about 99 per cent of them.
Parts of Israel might qualify loosely as the ‘North African desert’. Reports suggest that the CIA is reportedly building two new prisons there, one near Galilee, and one in the Negev. While the US has no closer (or better compensated) friend, the Israelis would be very unwise to allow their territory to be used for the kinds of techniques practiced by their amateurish US allies.
As a sane Israeli intelligence officer said of Abu Ghraib, the Israelis would not treat an Arab that way; Israelis know they have to live in the region and the victims of this senseless humiliation will remember it for a millennium. While Israel is a possible short-term destination for prisoners – given the marriage between the paranoid rump of Likud and the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Axis of Insanity – the CIA will ultimately not get away with holding its torture sessions there.
Inevitably, as it tries to hide its illegal practices, the CIA will be driven ever farther afield. Thailand reportedly hosted a CIA prison but it was closed in 2003. Perhaps most likely is Diego Garcia, the British protectorate 1,000 miles from anywhere in the Indian Ocean. Just as it does not take a genius to identify the criminal methods of al-Qaida, so the Bush administration’s response is also rather predictable: look for a hitherto unheard-of military base on a far-flung island with little chance that pesky lawyers will intervene. Sound familiar?
Of course, the UK government has issued a stern denial about Diego Garcia: ‘The US authorities have repeatedly assured us that assertions in the press that there are, or ever have been suspected terrorists under interrogation on Diego Garcia, or on any of the vessels in BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territories) or territorial waters are unfounded. The British representative on Diego Garcia has confirmed this to be the case.’
But should we believe these see-no-evil disclaimers? The Polish government has insisted that the CIA did not use Polish territory; the question is whether anyone believes them. The Germans assure us that there must be an innocent explanation for the hundreds of CIA flights in and out of Germany. Perhaps the tooth fairy really will visit children this year.
Sadly, one thing we do know is that the era of the US torture chamber is not over. President Bush has piously denied that the US would ever torture people. Inconveniently, at the moment he was saying this, vice-president ‘Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners’.
One has to ask why the CIA needs an exception to the torture ban. Even though Bush recently reached agreement with McCain on his torture ban, Bush’s staff are still pressing to exclude all prisoners held on foreign soil from US legal jurisdiction – in other words, the McCain Amendment, the Army Field Manual and the CIA interrogation manual may all forbid US personnel from torturing you, but once you have been tortured, you have no court that will listen; nowhere to complain.
Whether or not there is a US court of law that pays attention to torture, there will always be the court of public opinion. To return to Rumsfeldian philosophy, when it comes to secret prisons, there are various things we know we don't yet know, but there is probably little we don't know we don't know. The CIA can run but, in the long term, they just can't hide.
The coalition of lawyers representing the Guantanamo detainees and others, who vigorously object to the US taking part in torture, have access to the CIA flight records, reflecting several thousand trips taken by the CIA aircraft. As the victims of this shameful treatment emerge from the secret prisons, we can compare their accounts to the flight logs. In the meantime, thanks to the work of investigative journalists, we have plenty of clues as to where the CIA's criminal activity is taking place.
Meanwhile, back in Guantánamo, a soldier saluted the military defense lawyer representing Salim Hamdan: ‘Honor Bound, sir!’ My colleague saluted back sardonically, ‘To defend the US Constitution.’ Guantánamo, along with the Bush administration, should consider a change of motto.
• Clive Stafford Smith is legal director of Reprieve, a UK charity fighting for the lives of people facing the death penalty and other human rights abuses. He has represented 40 of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.
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