As I followed some stone steps leading through a pretty courtyard to the side entrance of the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the upper East side of New York last Thursday [1-9-14], I drew in a serious lungful of cold, crisp night air to help gird myself for what I was about to hear and see.
I was grateful for the upcoming forum and the opportunity to learn of the present situation of the detainees at Guantanamo, but the grim memory of past horrors inflicted on them and learning of fresh ones I knew would be enraging and depressing. Maybe, though, I would find some hope and inspiration.
I felt guilty for not being on top of the latest status of the prisoners. I had read somewhere an announcement that Obama had released eleven detainees since August, but not whether this signaled a promising momentum for more releases. That news was uplifting but cryptic. What about the 150 or so men remaining? What was the status of the intrepid hunger strike involving nearly a hundred that had commenced a year ago and that had incited such shocking and violent pushback from the military authorities? A recent email from The World Can’t Wait had reminded me it was the 12th anniversary of the Guantanamo gulag. Twelve years!
I knew I would be guaranteed a thorough consciousness-raising of the situation. Debra Sweet head of The World Can’t Wait would be speaking along with Guantanamo prisoners’ activist Andy Worthington visiting for the fifth year from the UK. There was also to be a viewing of a new documentary “Doctors of the Dark Side” about the scandal behind the torture scandal, directed by psychologist Martha Davis, also attending. Medical professionals through these long, dozen Orwellian years had participated in the amoral US detention and torture programs with little if any ethical or legal accountability.
Two other guests presenting compelling information on Guantanamo’s and other covert detention and torture programs were Todd Pierce, a former military lawyer for prisoners at Guantanamo, and Steven Reisner, a psychologist, member of the American Psychological Association and a consultant for Physicians for Human Rights. Reisner has been crusading for the detachment of psychologists from torture involvement and for such collusion’s ethical and legal accountability
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Todd Pierce at one point told us that professionals like himself, as a lawyer, or medical practitioners either harden their hearts when they find themselves directly faced with institutionalized evil which demands they ignore or defy their professional and personal ethical standards or instead their hearts open extraordinarily and they choose to courageously combat said evil. Pierce emphasized how our society expects and assumes higher standards from the professional classes. Tragically, legal and medical professionals have betrayed us big time, implementing and/or cooperating with amoral government/military policies such as torture and other war crimes -- again, defying moral and legal codes of justice and decency.
In fact, I learned from the film that having medical personnel on deck during so-called enhanced interrogations gave military personnel even greater motivation to push the torture to an nth degree. I even learned emergency tracheotomies at times had to be conducted on prisoners who had been zealously waterboarded. In spite of the presence of medical personnel, it has become known that at least 100 prisoners were “inadvertently” tortured to death. Medical personnel were then pressured to falsify death certificates to cover up such mistakes.
I was heartened to hear that Debra Sweet and her tireless national troup of World Can’t Wait activists along with Andy Worhington are embarking on a national tour entitled Close Guantanamo Now. After the New York forum, they would be heading to Washington, DC and soon after San Francisco. Psychologist Martha Davis’ compelling documentary “Doctors of the Dark Side”, four years in the making and narrated by Mercedes Ruehl, would be screened during this tour.
Andy Worthington reminded us it was the sixth year of Obama’s promise, made before and on his second day in office and periodically since then, that he would end the Guantanamo prison camp. It has become the world’s cruelest joke asserted Worthington. The cruelest of Obama’s favorite “Lucy and the football” game playing as I see it. What kind of a government, Worthington queried, not only incarcerates and exposes human beings to horrendously torturous conditions -- 800 men originally, three of them between 13 and 15, and the vast majority of whom were completely innocent, wrong place wrong time, when they were haphazardly rendered (“disappeared”) (most of them captured from exorbitant and apparently easily worth lying for bounties of $5000 each), but then chooses NOT to release -- YEAR AFTER YEAR -- those "officially" cleared. We are going on the prison’s twelfth year? The personal and vicious torturous conditions the men endure daily are one thing, but the mammoth screwing around with their sense of hope from such unrequited executive promising? Such a phenomenal level of sustained spiritual mass cruelty is hard to fathom or forgive.
Apparently one of the motivations of last year’s hunger strike was the alleged suicide from despair of Adnan Latif, cleared for release, who died in September of 2012 after years of awaiting justice.
Worthington acknowledges that Obama is faced with a profoundly heartless “war on terror” hysteria-exploiting Congress. A Pentagon that issues lying propaganda about recidivism rates of Middle Eastern prisoners rejoining terrorist fighting. But he points out that Obama is not shy about flexing his authority in other dimensions, defying respect for Congressional approval when it comes to his executive targeted killing drone program for example. In fact Worthington shared that John Bellinger, Bush adviser who justified unauthorized killings, asserts that the Obama administration has decided to kill people with drones instead of imprisoning them.
After the forum I googled The World Can’t Wait website and discovered a compelling article by Dennis Loo entitled “Why is Guantanamo Still Open?” Loo shares Obama’s pre-election words re Guantanamo.
“We will lead in the observance of human rights, and the rule of law, and civil rights and due process, which is why I will close Guantanamo and I will restore habeas corpus and say no to torture. Because if you elect me, you will have elected a president who has taught the Constitution, who believes in the Constitution, and who will restore and obey the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Loo goes on to explain the Obama administration’s realpolitik and latest protocol involving the prison:
[Obama] closed the office responsible for processing prisoners’ releases; made it harder for lawyers to meet with their clients by recently banning commercial flights to the prison and barring emergency calls by attorneys to the detainees; ordered forced feeding through excruciating means and by strapping prisoners down [note: withholding local anesthetics and lubricants] (a violation of medical ethics and torture in itself); and authorized an April 13, 2013 assault in which guards fired rubber bullets on hunger strikers. Obama does not need Congressional approval: as Commander-in-Chief, he has the power to shut the prison down now.
While Obama cites Congressional interference for his inability to close GTMO, he has not allowed Congressional interference and opposition to his drone assassination program to stop him from using drones to kill thousands. Why is the POTUS powerless in the first instance to act in spite of some Congressional opposition and all powerful in the second, again in the face of Congressional opposition?
Debra Sweet reveals on her website that the illegal prison has new infrastructure added with more personnel than ever. 78 prisoners there were cleared for release years ago. There are 45 prisoners whom Obama says will never be charged or released and 30 who are to go through “military commissions” trials which are used to cover up the reality of inflicted torture on the prisoners and to deprive them of judicial rights in the US court system.
Debra Sweet also addressed the issue of the falseness of so many of the arrests of present and past Guantanamo prisoners. She shared an anecdote from a Chicago high school teacher who when inquiring about her students’ impressions of the Guantanamo prison camp was told firmly by a student it was akin to the “lynchings” of the old South. He explained that as with the lynchings the actual guilt or innocence of a victim did not matter so much as the general terror the lynchings inspired on an entire black population. The terror of Guantanamo and other US/NATO military black sites have a similar impact on Middle Eastern populations. Apparently the “battle for hearts and minds” of foreigners has morphed into traumatizing and terrorizing said foreign hearts and minds rather than rationalizing with and rewarding them.
There was a stunning array of heart breaking and enraging methods of both psychological and physical torture -- some having been discontinued under Obama’s administration [SOME NOT!!!], revealed during the forum from the film or speakers. Temperature extremes, sensory deprivation, 24 hour flourescent lighting, 24 hour sustained assaultive noise, solitary confinement, riot squad attacks and punchouts with night sticks, sleep deprivation, aggressive force feeding, genital mutilation, sexual degradation, threats to kill a prisoner’s family members, manipulation with drugs, stress positions, organ-damaging, bone-breaking sustained shackling and suspension from vulnerable body parts, withholding of appropriate and timely medical care, the infamous water boarding, etc. ETCETERA!!!
What does torture begat, besides creating horrifying hells for its victims and demoralizing evil behavior of our just-following-orders troops? FALSE confessions. Psychologically and physically damaged human beings willing to confess to ANYTHING. The Bush administration used such confessions in part to try to justify its exploitive “Global War on Terror”. What are the supposedly lesser-evil but continuing-torturous-conditions reasons on Obama’s watch begetting, except a lot more conversions of the prisoners’ loved ones and countrypersons to intense anti-Americanism? Also the continuing and deepening alienation for many of us American citizens from our Orwellian government.
The counter-reaction from our military ruthlessness and recklessness of so much foreign victimization is a radicalization of Middle Eastern populations. This entrenches dangerous extremism such as Islamic fundamentalism, which is particularly harsh on the lives of women.
Domestically our obscene military over-investment of tax dollars and troops cost us not only human iives gratuitously lost or maimed but deep sacrifices in education, employment, health, housing, culture, infrastructure, etc. programs for average citizens. Enormous profits for opportunistic war contractors, of course.
Getting back to the torture policy of the US itself, the two psychologists who engineered reversing the SERE program to set up an advanced interrogation program promoting “psychological dislocation” and severe physical pain were James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Worthington revealed that both of these men are now covered by a $5 million defense fund provided by the CIA against any attempts at liability or accountability. Mitchell himself it was revealed during the film encouraged a prisoner be waterboarded 83 times!
Worthington asserts that of the 153 prisoners remaining at Guantanamo only a couple dozen may actually be criminally culpable of terrorism. Some apparently were Taliban foot soldiers in Afghanistan, but of those some served long before the US even became an “official” Taliban enemy.
I’ll close with a statement I also found on The World Can’t Wait website from Shaker Aamer from January 11, 2014. He is a prisoner who has been held almost twelve years and who was cleared for release under both Bush and Obama administrations:
Today is the twelfth anniversary of the establishment of Guantánamo Bay. It has been a blot on the reputation of America, and will remain that until, first, it is closed, and second, lessons are learned from it that can help prevent any repetition in the decades to come.
It will soon be 12 years that I have been in Guantánamo. I arrived on the day my youngest child Faris was born (February 14th). Even then, I had already spent some two months in US captivity, undergoing terrible mistreatment. Those are twelve years that are lost to me forever.
What I have missed most has been the opportunity to do my part to fill up my four children’s reservoir of love. The early years of a child’s life is a parent’s best chance to show them what love is, before they become more distant with approaching adulthood. Losing this, my opportunity and obligation, is my greatest regret.
However, we must look forward, rather than backwards. Even though British agents supported the Americans in my abuse, I wish them no ill. I do not even want to see them punished. I want only to come home to my family so that I can try to make up to them what I have been unable to provide for all these years.
I am on hunger strike once more. The US military wants to repress the truth about Guantánamo, but the truth will always come out. Others suffer even more than I do. All hunger strikers in Camp VI are now being brought over for a dose of the worst medicine the military can provide here – Camp V Echo, the Alcatraz of Guantánamo Bay. The cells are all steel, and the metal chills the bones as if you are trying to sleep in a refrigeration unit. They now punish us with force feeding, and they punish us with hypothermia, all because we call for justice.
Yet justice will be restored – justice must be restored.
I must say one thing to people out there about January 11: My biggest fear is that someone will do something stupid on the anniversary. When anyone does something wrong on the outside, we on the inside have to pay the price for it. When there was that incident in Yemen, the Americans banned the Yemenis from going home – even though it had nothing to do with the Yemenis here in Guantánamo Bay. I am grateful to those who support us. But if anyone wants to demonstrate on our behalf against the black stain that is Guantánamo, please do it in good faith and good humour, and above all practice no violence.
How many of us could manage such rationality, good will and wisdom after an ongoing, unfathomable nightmare reality of a dozen years and still counting?
[cross-posted on correntewire and open salon]