Apparently, there are still black-shirted, Bush-era goon squads in operation down at Guantanamo. You'd think after all the revelations of detainee mistreatment, humiliation, torture, abuse, murder, and so on, that the Obama adminstration would aim for impeccable standards of detainee treatment as they try to figure out how to close GITMO legally, safely, and above all, with utmost deference to basic human rights for potentially innocent individuals who have been incarcerated for years without charges. You'd be wrong.
Theese goon squads dress in full riot gear go by the name Emergency (or Immediate) Reaction Forces.
The existence of these forces has been documented since the early days of Guantánamo, but it has rarely been mentioned in the U.S. media or in congressional inquiries into torture. On paper, IRF teams are made up of five military police officers who are on constant stand-by to respond to emergencies. "The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction," according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo. The document was signed on March 27, 2003, by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the man credited with eventually "Gitmoizing" Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons and who reportedly ordered subordinates to treat prisoners "like dogs." Gen. Miller ran Guantánamo from November 2002 until August 2003 before moving to Iraq in 2004.
When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader" suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg. According to the SOP memo, the teams are to give verbal warnings to prisoners before storming the cell: "Prior to the use of the IRF team, an interpreter will be used to tell the detainee of the discipline measures to be taken against him and ask whether he intends to resist. Regardless of his answer, his recent behavior and demeanor should be taken into account in determining the validity of his answer."The IRF team is authorized to spray the detainee in the face with mace twice before entering the cell.
I'm not against using overwhelming force, i.e., five-to-one force ratio on non-compliant detainees, because such overwhelming physical force protected by full riot gear pretty much insures no need whatsoever for more painful or potentially lethal methods of coercion. In other words, such overwhelming odds should theoretically act as an upper limit on the use of force. If five guys in full riot gear cannot effectively restrain one other guy who is not equally suited-up without beating, kicking, clubbing, tasing, or chemically irritating the detainee, then you've got the wrong five guys.
My brother was a prison guard for years, so I have heard enough prison stories to understand that fear and contempt and the general antagonism between guards and inmates is pretty standard and breeds inhumane behavior on all sides. But let's get real: The power in these situations is vastly asymmetrical to the point of being virtually non-existent for the inmate. Guards are dominant and inmates are subordinate in every conceivable way, and everybody knows it.
This next part of General Miller's memo is a ludicrously dishonest disavowal:
According to Gen. Miller's memo: "The physical security of U.S. forces and detainees in U.S. care is paramount. Use the minimum force necessary for mission accomplishment and force protection ... Use of the IRF team and levels of force are not to be used as a method of punishment."
This is a lie precisely because giving someone, especially males, but females also, an absolute authority with a monopoly of power and violence against someone else who is further stigmatized as criminal, evil, stupid, violent, sub-human, or generally as an enemy, etc., is virtually guaranteed to result in the abuse of that monopoly power, particularly if that monopoly is challenged in the slightest.
Here is but one example of how the IRF teams operate from Jeremy Scahill's article at Common Dreams:
"The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face ... " according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a "sexual attack." In March 2004, after being "sprayed in the eyes with mace," Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the incident:
"They brought their pepper spray and held him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.
"Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.
"He's totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky -- he can't see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guantánamo."
In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes' eye.
Read the whole article if you want the all you can eat buffet of abuses routinely committed by these teams. I'm sure you don't need to hear about the feces, toilet, beating, drowning, and Tango Block incidents also endured by this one man (who was previously detained, rendered, tortured, and interrogated by US & UK forces in Pakistan prior to being shipped over to GITMO, all for vacationing while Muslim).
But one month [after Obama's inauguration], the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected, including "beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike," according to Reuters.
"Certainly in my experience there have been many, many more reported incidents of abuse since the inauguration," Ghappour said.
Okay. One month in office is not a long time, but how long does it take to issue an order that detainee mistreatment should cease and desist immediately? Obama doesn't need any false confession to justify wars of aggression. He's already got his wars. Nevertheless, the culture of abuse is established, operative, and perhaps even ramping up by some reports.
In April, Mohammad al-Qurani, a 21-year-old Guantánamo prisoner from Chad managed to call Al-Jazeera and described a recent beating: "This treatment started about 20 days before Obama came into power, and since then I've been subjected to it almost every day," he said. "Since Obama took charge, he has not shown us that anything will change."
Obama should end this shit immediately. After all, who's in charge?