Anatomy of a War Crime, Part III

Continuing the summary of the horrific story in Jane Mayer's book "The Dark Side" let me briefly address the issue of Guantanamo prisoners. In the summer of 2002 the military had become very irritated by lack of information from the prisoners at the camp. The interrogators were hitting a wall with almost every prisoner and when the White House asked to see files, many prisoners did not have any. So, could it be that these were super-trained terrorists trained in the art of evasion and were waiting out the interrogators refusing to give up information on an imminent attack? Not by a long shot.

What Mayer and other investigative journalists have concluded is that the reason why they were not getting anything out of them is because they did not know anything. Where do we get this information? From the CIA! Concerned with the situation CIA sent a senior intelligence officer in the summer of 2002 to the island. He was a man fluent in Arabic who spent hours talking to them, drinking tea, listening to their stories. What he concluded was devastating to the administration: most of these people had nothing to do with terrorism. Let us take several examples.

Among the prisoners was an Arab teenager who was so deranged that he was eating his own feces, and an eighty year old man who was deaf. Another man was a rich Kuwaiti who had spent every year doing charity work in a Muslim country and 2001 happened to be the year he was in Afghanistan. He told the CIA interrogator that he had always bought Cadillacs and was now so furious with his imprisonment he would only buy Mercedeses from now on. A particularly horrific story came from an Iraqi Shiite who fled Iraq due to his opposition to Saddam and he hid in Iran. He was captured in Iran and deported to Afghanistan where he was imprisoned by the Taliban for being a "US spy" for his anti-Saddam activities. In the aftermath of Sept.11th he fled to Pakistan where he was picked up by a warlord and extradited to the US authorities for $5000 bounty. He had no idea what was going on!

A study by the Seaton Hall University Law school supports the findings of the CIA. The study reviewed in depth 517 Guantanamo cases. Of these only 8% had any associations with AL-Qaeda. 55% were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the US at all, remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, mostly for fleeing from the US bombs! Only 5% had been captured by US forces and the rest had been captured by local warlords for hefty bounties.

After the summer of 2002, interrogation methods got nastier. The torture that had been approved for CIA at the "black site" prisons abroad now spread to the military: sleep deprivation, threats, humiliations, chaining to the floor, loud music. The situation got so out of control that Condi Rice's lawyer Bellinger tried to get audience with the President but was confronted with Gonzales, Addington (the War Council I have written about before) who told him that detainee policy was off limits, there was nothing to be discussed, they argued. The authorization for the detainee interrogations came from the President personally.

So the claims by the Bush administration that abuses that happened at Gitmo and later Abu Ghraib were sporadic results of frustration and bad behavior are just simply LIES!

In the most recent edition, the New York Review of Books is running an article by Mark Danner titled "US Torture: Voices from the Black sites in which he summarizes the previously classified report by the International Committee of the Red Cross which was the only international organization to interview in depth the 14 high-priority prisoners who were interrogated at CIA prisons. It makes for a very, very depressing read and confirms all the claims made by Mayer in her "The Dark Side."

In any case, it is clear that the Bush administration committed serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, but also the US Convention Against Torture. If the US government won't prosecute Bush officials than all of the countries that are signatories to the Geneva Conventions have a legal obligation to arrest them if they are on their territory and extradite them to the International Criminal Court in the Hague.