| stuartj |
05-05-2006 07:39 PM |
Here you go Mul. Regarding America's loss of face internationally. Opinion piece in today's paper...seems to nail most the issues quite succcinctly.
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"Guantanamo a testament to America's loss of honour"
Just what, exactly, is the United States Government doing at Guantanamo Bay?
In November it will be five years since the first contingent of terror suspects rounded up across the world in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, were shipped to the jail within the American military base in Cuba.
Since then, more than 750 detainees are reported to have passed through the prison. Today about 500 remain, including Australian David Hicks. The identities of many, like the accusations against them, remain a mystery.
At first, some in a world deeply shocked by the 9/11 atrocities were prepared to suspend judgement when the Bush Administration turned its back on fundamental Western legal conventions - denying the captives the status and protections of prisoners of war, and detaining them indefinitely without charge or trial at an outpost deemed beyond the reach of international and United States law.
But what, it must now be asked, has been achieved by this flouting of some of the most fundamental precepts of civilised society by the nation supposed to be the modern exemplar of those principles?
Today not one of the Guantanamo prisoners has faced trial, let alone been convicted. Just 10 of them - an apparently random sample that includes the hapless Hicks - have been charged with terrorism-related offences and are to be tried before dubious military tribunals constituted, like their prison, to operate beyond the constraints of legal accountability.
The identities of most of these people - some of whom, like Hicks, have been held for more than four years - were a secret until the Pentagon released a partial list last month giving the names and nationalities of 558 prisoners currently or previously detained at Guantanamo (and then only when compelled by a US court after a protracted freedom of information battle with the Associated Press).
A 50-page report released this week by Amnesty International gives disturbing new evidence not only that the bulk of the men now in Guantanamo are probably being held on trivial or trumped-up grounds, but also that they continue to be subjected to serious human rights abuses.
The report for the United Nations Committee Against Torture describes an analysis in February of US Defence Department data relating to 517 Guantanamo detainees that found that 55 per cent of them had "no hostile acts listed against them as the basis for their detention". It said only 5 per cent of the individuals had been captured by US forces on the battlefield in Afghanistan - the rest caught in neighbouring Pakistan "and handed over to the USA by warlords for bounty".
US military authorities claim charges are still pending against about "two dozen" of the remaining detainees. But in a further indication of the flimsy grounds on which many are still being held, it was reported last week that a further 141 detainees had been cleared for imminent release, if not apologies, by military prosecutors.
Amnesty says the conditions in Guantanamo and the indefinite detentions constitute "cruel, inhuman and degrading" punishment that puts the US in breach of the UN Torture Convention. It says prisoners in the maximum security "Camp V" - where David Hicks was recently returned to solitary confinement - are held for up to 24 hours a day in small isolation cells. "They are allowed out of their cells three times a week for a shower and exercise, although reportedly this is often reduced to once a week," it says.
Five UN special rapporteurs called in February for the prison to be closed after accusing the military of engaging in torture through the use of solitary confinement, holding detainees naked, using excessive force and roughly force-feeding hunger strikers. The Pentagon has now acknowledged more than 30 suicide attempts at Guantanamo, but other cases have been reclassified in classic doublespeak as "manipulative self-injurious behaviour".
A moving account of life inside Guantanamo has been given by Mahvish Khan, a young law student working with the Miami public defender's office who has visited the prison nine times as an interpreter.
Writing in The Washington Post, she tells the story of Ali Shah Mousovi, a young physician who came home to Afghanistan in 2003 to open a clinic after living in Iran for 12 years. Mousovi was immediately arrested after, he thinks, bounty hunters gave his name to the military. He says he was beaten and tortured by US interrogators before being shipped to Cuba, a world away from his wife and three young children.
Khan also describes the plight of 80-year-old Haji Nusrat, Guantanamo's oldest prisoner. An illiterate farmer from an isolated Afghan village, he was arrested in 2003 after complaining to US forces about the earlier wrongful detention of his son: "He cannot stand up without assistance and hobbles to the bathroom behind a walker. Despite his paralysis, his swollen feet and legs are tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor."
Four-and-a-half years on, Guantanamo has done nothing to bring to account the real architects of the 9/11 attacks, to bring justice for their victims or to help answer the threat of global terrorism. Instead, like Baghdad's Abu Ghraib, it has become a byword for a mindless brand of brutal revenge.
The first casualties in the war on terror have been truth and America's honour. Enough is surely enough.
Mark Baker is diplomatic editor.
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