Christopher King

Christopher King argues that the Guantanamo torture facility offers the world a glimpse into “the dark heart” and the truth of the United States. It is, he says, “a clear example of behaviour beyond criminality into a region of inhumanity so dark it has never been named”.

The Guantanamo Bay torture facility, intentionally outside law, its associated kidnapping and torture both on site and by arrangement with other countries, is the dark heart, the truth of the “Land of the free and the home of the brave”. If you know about Guantanamo, you know how little law, decency and human rights truly mean to the United States, because the old excuse of “a few bad apples” that was used for Abu-Ghraib among others, doesn’t wash here. It’s all offical government policy from the president down. And it’s still open on Barack Obama’s watch.

Never mind the instances of waterboarding, razor-cut genitals, brutality, degradation and sexual abuse of alleged terrorists in order to gain “valuable intelligence that has saved American lives”. Nor the destroyed tapes, better than words, that showed precisely what was done and how worthless that intelligence really was. Let’s look at the case of 17 men who were always known to be innocent.

The 17 Uighurs, Chinese Muslims, were taken into custody in Pakistan and Afghanistan where they had been sold to the Americans by informers for up to USD 25,000 each. This is what passes for American intelligence. The unfortunate 17 were presumably hooded, shackled and flown on the floor of a miliary transport to Cuba in the usual way. There we don’t know how they were treated. But we’d like to. Like their ingenious means of killing people, the Americans have been inventing ingenious lists of abuses that they could argue were not really torture since they did not result in organ failure or death. These were the criteria.

Now, it could not have taken even the sadists of Guantanamo long to realize that despite whatever abuses they subjected the Uighurs to, they all told the same story and even the stories they made up under non-torture didn’t make sense. They had scooped up a batch of innocents (among others). What to do? You can see the problem. They should have been released in Pakistan or at least screened at Guantanamo and flown back quickly with pockets full of money. There’s nowhere to free them to from Guantanamo, which is a leased bit of Cuba that the Cubans want back and relations with Cuba haven’t been good for 40 years. As usual, the US doesn’t like them running their own country.

The military mind needs orders. There were orders to cover kidnap and torture but not of the wrong people, so orders must be sought. Presumably, after long discussions ever higher up the chain about cover-up, shooting them anyway, crashing them in a plane, etc, it was realized that, apart from what had or hadn’t been done to them, the Uighurs had seen too much. They couldn’t be just let go and certainly not on the American mainland. Lawyers would be all over them and with a good law firm, the bill would be billions and everything about Guantanamo would have come out in lurid detail over a long period. Because they were actually innocent, they couldn’t be controlled by military laws and would have the same rights as any American. So nothing was done. That required no decisions so they stayed in their cages.

Seven years later, Obama inherited the problem. They have to be kept out of the US, so the US citizenry are now told simultaneously that they are innocent but coming from Guantanamo they are dangerous. The American public sees no contradiction or flaw here.

There is notable reluctance of other countries to take the Uighurs, not from fear but because there is a strong feeling that America should sort them out decently itself and there might be diplomatic and legal complications if the Uighurs want to sue the US government as they certainly should.

The US view is clearly that the group of Uighurs must be broken up, otherwise they will be a formidable action group generating bad publicity for the US. In 2006, four, presumably the most unlikely to cause trouble, were sent to Albania (!), perhaps the most backward European ex-socialist country. They have to learn the language and will find it impossible to get publicity or legal representation without money. An ideal out-of-the-way place for potential trouble-makers. Doubtless they have been threatened and have had to sign gagging orders to gain release. In any event, they have seen and experienced the true soul of America, which is terrifying enough. Some bribery to the Albanian government has doubtless gained cooperation there. This seems to have gone well from the US viewpoint. How the Uighurs are coping, no-one cares.

A few days ago, four more Uighurs were sent to Bermuda. The ridiculous story is that the arrangement was between the US and the Bermudan government, with the UK government knowing nothing about it. This preserves deniability for Gordon Brown in case the Chinese, who want the Uighurs as terrorists, get upset. No-one will believe it. From reports, these four are back-country boys who are just happy to get out of Guantanamo, they like Bermuda a lot more than Central Asia and don’t realize that they need a team of lawyers.

The present proposal is to send the rest of the Uighurs to Palau. Palau? Curiously, Palau voted with Israel and the Marshall Islands, the only countries to vote with the US against the October 2007 United Nations (UN) resolution to end the embargo of Cuba. Palau turns out to be a tiny Pacific island to the right of the Philippines, population about 21,000 spread around small villages but most importantly, it’s in a “Compact of Free Association” with the US following the end of UN trusteeship. This is the civilian version of the Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement that lets the US do whatever it likes outside UN oversight, much less control. The Palau government is supported by US aid in return for hosting a military base. It’s ideal. Guantanamo without the cages. Thousands of miles from any bleeding heart liberals, with the US military in full control, phone lines monitored and probably not a lawyer on the island. Anyway, it seems that the Uighurs don’t like the idea of Palau and who can blame them?

The Marshall Islands also fell out of UN trusteeship into a similar unhappy “free association” compact with the US and gained a missile base with nuclear tests on its paradisaic atolls to boot. When these islands vote with the US in the UN, it’s merely a legal trick but no more than one has come to expect. The UN needs to protect these small communities from US predation and take them back into non-militarized trusteeship when the agreements lapse. This is annexation by stealth. Palau’s agreement lapses on October this year and the UN needs to act.

Here’s the core of the situation. Seventeen innocent men were kidnapped, taken to US territory and tortured by being kept in the Guantanamo torture facility, even if no finger was laid on them there, which I doubt. The hooded flight there and living in a cage would be torture in themselves. They’ve been there for seven years too. The thin legalistic argument that Guantanamo is outside US civil law is simply disgusting. Leaving aside other Guantanamo inmates, the US must assign to every one of these Uighurs the same rights that US citizens have, settle them on the US mainland initially and pay for resettlement and legal representation. Then compensation needs to be negotiated. It’s entirely the US’s responsibility. Obama had started talking about taking them into the US but backed out of it. Marooning these innocent men on a prison island like Palau or in Albania is in keeping with the true face of America. This is what lies behind the Obama smile. On his watch, there’s a serious proposal to change the law to enable those Guantanamo prisoners who plead guilty to the most serious charges to be executed without trial. The true face of America is sickening.

That Palau vote on Cuba suggested further interest, however. It turns out that the Guantanamo torture facility probably voids the lease of that territory by the US from Cuba because a prison of any sort is outside the terms of the lease. Really, it’s an outrageous violation of the lease that Cuba should keep pressing at the UN. Indeed, the lease was void from the beginning under international law for the same reasons I suggested that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would have no legal validity due to:

The 2003 lecture at the University of British Columbia by Professor Alfred de Zayas on “The Status of Guantanamo Bay and the Status of the Detainees” is an interesting read that also relates to the proposed Israel-Palestine agreement. The US has no claim to Guantanamo under international law and particularly after what it has done there, it should get out.

The whole world sees the United States using bribery, subversion, military threats and violence to destabilize other countries that it then calls “failed states”. Guantanamo is a clear example of behaviour beyond criminality into a region of inhumanity so dark it has never been named. The primary failed state is the United States itself and it is having to work hard to conceal that from its own population – the only people who do not realize it. The US has a long way to go before becoming a humane member of the world community, but some steps are to close Guantanamo, return the territory to Cuba, treat the Uighurs with decency according to its own laws and demilitarize Palau and the Marshall Islands.

At present the European Union leads the world in social and humanitarian progress but that position is no longer certain due to the subversion of its political class by the United States, none so obviously as the Brown government and the UK Parliament. Guantanamo is a glimpse of the truth, a warning. It is urgent that the EU reviews this dangerous relationship before it slips wholly into the ethical void that the US has opened up.

Christopher King is a retired consultant and lecturer in management and marketing. He lives in London, UK.

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Source: http://www.redress.cc/americas/cking20090619
RE: Illustration: From Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic. "Arbeit Macht Frei" means Work Brings Freedom. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps "as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom." The ice-cold cynicism has hardly been surpassed since that time. -Until the Americans created their own gulags, that is. Their evil contempt for higher values is the same. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeit_macht_frei]