[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] How to Build a Human Bomb

[Bill Totten]

Guantanamo Bay is killing people thousands of miles away.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (May 13 2008)


When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself
up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a
vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the
detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on
Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and
that it is dangerous ever to release the camp's prisoners {1}. On the
contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first
place.

Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least thirty former
Guantanamo detainees who have "taken part in anti-coalition militant
activities after leaving US detention" {2}. Given that the majority of
the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were
detained, that's one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out
that "anti-coalition militant activities" include talking to the media
about their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton
Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they
collaborated with Michael Winterbottom's film The Road to Guantanamo.
But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have
fought with the Taliban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or
planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn
from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government.

The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men "successfully lied
to US officials, sometimes for over three years". {3} The US
government's intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective,
and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or
resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense
and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a
presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due
process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether
or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny
justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.

Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to
deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan {4}. He
admitted that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern
Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made "under
pressure and threats" {5}. When the Americans released him from
Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial,
but without the admissable evidence required to convict him. Among his
defences was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his
supposed testimony {6}. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to
the contrary, found him innocent.

All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA's other
detention centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable,
because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture
is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say
anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of
former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques - devised
or approved at the highest levels in Washington - have been used to make
inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.

In his book Torture Team (2008), Philippe Sands describes the treatment
of Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the
authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as "the twentieth
hijacker". By the time his interrogators started using "enhanced
techniques" to extract information from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in
isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An
official memo shows that he "was talking to non-existent people,
reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell
covered with a sheet for hours on end" {7}. He was sexually abused,
exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of
torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a
man in this state?


The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed
conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior
fighting, but were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made
before blowing himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by
his ill-treatment in Guantanamo Bay. "Twelve thousand kilometers away
from Mecca, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those
infidels want", he said {8}. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and "used
for experiments" and that "the Americans delighted in insulting our
prayer and Islam and they insulted the Koran and threw it in dirty
places" {9}. Al-Ajmi's lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by
guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying {10}.

The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment
that would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life,
published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards
greeted him on his arrival with these words. "Do you know what the
Germans did to the Jews? That's exactly what we're going to do with
you." There were certain similarities. "I knew a man from Morocco",
Kurnaz writes, "who used to be a ship captain. He couldn't move one of
his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were
all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They
brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers
left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs." The young man -
scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz's had just had his
legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a
coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and
covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every
time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the
wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every
other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp's Immediate Reaction
Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more {11}.

Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their
fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions,
deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at
the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, "maybe the guy who goes into
Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's
going to come out a fully fledged jihadist." {12}

In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings,
extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the
United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear.
The first is that these practices do not supplement effective
investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process
which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US
has deployed a process which generates nonsense and is incapable of
separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from
protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further
atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it
is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide
Attack. Washington Post.

2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees
who have returned to the fight.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/d20070712formergtmo.pdf

3. ibid

4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy
Combatants at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of
Defense, No date given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence.
Pages 8-9 of the pdf file.
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/000201-000299.pdf#38

5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative
Review Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf.
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/ARB_Transcript_Set_17_22822-23051.pdf#466.

6. No author given, 26th May 2006. Five ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in
Kuwait. Associated Press.

7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal
of American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008.

8. Quoted by Alissa J Rubin, 9th May 2008. Bomber's Final Messages
Exhort Fighters Against US. New York Times.

9. ibid

10. Ben Fox, 7th May 2008. Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack.
Associated Press.

11. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in
Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008.

12. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. Using terror to fight
terror. The Observer.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/13/how-to-build-a-human-bomb/


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