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 MEET
"THE ENEMY" - CONDEMNED TO EXILE AND DEPRIVATION . . .
In case anyone has forgotten, these are the people who lived (and died) under the vicious, genocidal Anglo-American bombardment of Kabul. Yet, even now, their ordeal is not over. Desperation sets in as winter begins its descent upon Afghanistan and refugees face starvation and disease. WE MUST NEVER FORGET NOR FORGIVE THESE ATROCITIES. 
To this cowardly man of dishonour, breaker of treaties, and would-be world
dictator, the heartless murder of men, women, and children is always "unfortunate"
but nevertheless "justified". This madman must face justice.
TORTURE ON GUANTANAMO America the Brave, let's all thank God that we now have that smirking neo-dictator, president-by-default George W. Bush, to protect the world from terrorists, regardless of cost. The American people should feel so proud that they have put madmen in charge of their country. U.S. Department of Defence officials claim that the conditions at Guantanamo are humane and in accordance with the Geneva Convention. However, the validity of the Americans' claims are questioned following the release of pictures of the detainees and foremost among issues raised was the question of the legal status of detainees. These men have not been tried, not been charged, not even officially arrested. And, in most cases, they have in effect been kidnapped from their own countries. This kind of behaviour must be unacceptable to any society calling itself civilized. In the interview with Panorama, one of the released men spoke not just about his treatment in Guantanamo Bay but about the U.S. detention centre in Bagram Airbase where he was held before being transported there. He was tortured - forced to kneel, with his hands shackled above his head, for long periods, and with a gun pointed at his head. (The U.S. military spokesman at Bagram, Colonel Rodney Davis, says "It's not part of our culture, it's not part of what we do. We didn't come here to bring terror, we came here to stop terror.") Guantanamo Bay (a.k.a. 'Camp America') is transplanted middle America, complete with McDonald's and ten-pin bowling. The 3,000 residents live in American-style homes, shop for American products and drive American cars, and have cable TV. Guantanamo Bay itself, officially 'leased' from Cuba, is a sprawl of military detention camps set up by military decree of the 'commander-in-chief'. (It is argued that because they were not set up by the the president - in his capacity as 'president' - they are outside the control of the American Constitution and of the American courts.) U.S. Marines first occupied Guantanamo Bay on June 6, 1898. In 1903, the newly-established Cuban Republic gave in to U.S. demands to officially 'lease' Guantanamo Bay to them. The official rent was, and remains, 2,000 gold coins a year and a warning that Cuba could not unilaterally terminate the 'lease'. Fidel Castro, recognizing the base as an affront to Cuban sovereignty, refuses to cash the United States' annual cheque for $4,085. 
The base (code name GITMO) straddles both sides of the 2.5 mile-wide bay
on the south-eastern coast of Cuba, in the Oriente Province, about 400
air miles from Miami, Florida. It is divided into two distinct areas; the
airfield on the Leeward side and the main base on the Windward side.
To identify the camps, a name was designated to each to correspond with the military radio alphabet (Camp Alpha, Camp Bravo, etc.). Sites on the north side of the base were designated using the opposite end of the alphabet; this included the infamous Camp X-Ray. The military said that Camp X-Ray had been closed in April 2002 and that the detainees had been transferred to Camp Delta yet many reports indicate that Camp X-Ray is still active. One of the camps, Camp Iguana, holds children as young as 13 for interrogation and torture. U.S. military operations are based on 'Joint Task Forces' (JTFs); JTF160 was established for Al Qaeda, Taliban or others and for providing support to JTF170, which handles interrogations and coordination among government agencies involved in interrogation. The U.S. has refused the 'prisoners of war' designation for the prisoners. In fact, they do not even admit that they have prisoners, referring to them instead as 'detainees' or as 'illegal combatants'. And, since Guantanamo Bay is not legitimately U.S. territory, those imprisoned are denied the rights of someone brought into the U.S. itself. Besides, Washington has repeatedly said "prisoners have no rights". Imagine the scene . . . A group of alleged Irish terrorists is seized and handed over to the British Government by a third country. They are held without access to any lawyers. Some are threatened by interrogating intelligence officers. They are told that if they don't tell them what they want to know then they might simply 'disappear'. Some of the men are tortured whilst being held and forced into confessing that they are members of a terrorist organisation. The men are drugged and bound and then flown out of the country to some out-of-the-way island camp, where lawyers are appointed for them but where the normal guarantees of defendants' rights do not apply. Those lawyers cannot appeal for their release - no mechanism exists - nor can they challenge their extradition or the criteria for it. In that island camp, they will face an emergency military tribunal that is quite prepared to kill them. Confronted with these gross violations, the international media and human rights organisations would rightly be up in arms in protest. 
The reality of what is happening to the prisoners on Guantanamo Bay - and at other American military camps - is that following their abduction from their home countries, prisoners are brutalised, often tortured, stripped of their most basic rights under any civilized law, rights guaranteed at the International Tribunal in the Hague. The basic legal rule of 'habeas corpus' is ignored. These men are being held captive indefinitely and without trial. And, it is claimed, Guantanamo Bay and similar U.S. 'overseas bases' are outside the jurisdiction even of the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact all these military setups seem to be completely unaccountable under any democratic system of law, a clearly intolerable situation. In articles in the Los Angeles Times and in the Guardian it is described how the Pentagon adopts a policy of 'enforced disappearance' of people. Prisoners are kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges. Tens of thousands of people have been made to 'disappear' by U.S. allies in Latin America in the last few decades. Australian detainees David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib had likely been tortured whilst at Guantanamo Bay, said Australian lawyer Richard Bourke, who has been working with prisoners at Camp X-Ray for the past two years. "People sometimes argue about the definition of torture. What they are doing clearly comes within the definition of torture under the international convention, but they are engaging in what amounts to torture in the medieval sense of the phrase. The reports about the number of suicide attempts and the mental health of the detainees is evidence of the treatment meted out to prisoners." Mr Bourke is to take his information to the United Nations Standing Committee on Torture and has called on governments around the world to stand up to the U.S. Said David Hicks' father, Terry: "We all know that Americans deal with torture in different ways, they've got the stress-and-duress method, where they wake them up and keep them awake but now we know that they're tying them up, firing rubber bullets at them, putting them in crucifix positions in the hot sun and making them squat for hours on end." Mr Hicks said he would take advantage of the U.S. president's visit to Australia at the end of October to highlight the injustice of his son's detention. Adelaide-born David Hicks will be among those facing a U.S. military kangaroo court. He has not been charged and no date has been set for any hearing. Let's look at the Geneva Conventions. Not the obvious stuff like the proscriptions on summary executions (witnessed across Afghanistan as the Taliban fell) or torture or humiliating and degrading treatment, but the nitty-gritty of legal process. Details like the proscription on the handing-over of prisoners of war to a third party that is not a party to the war, which America insists implausibly to the International Committee for the Red Cross that it is not; in other words, the U.S. claims that that in Afghanistan, or instance, it was merely assisting anti-Taliban forces rather than prosecuting a war. Or the little detail that insists that those prisoners must be tried by regularly constituted courts, not military kangaroo courts. If they are combatants - and prisoners of war - acting under orders, then, as the U.S. Supreme Court's ex-parte Quirin ruling declared in 1942 in the case of a group of German saboteurs seized in America in the Second World War, they 'are subject [only] to capture and detention as prisoners of war'. But then, says the Bush administration, these aren't prisoners of war at all. They are men who fought without uniforms. They bore their weapons in secret for a criminal organisation without a formal legal command. They are criminals, they argue, 'unlawful combatants', and therefore not covered by the protections of the Geneva Conventions. And there lies the source of the Bush government's greatest contortions and convolutions. For if the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are not covered by the 'laws of war', then they are common criminals. And the rights of ordinary - and even extraordinary - criminals are supposedly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. So if the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay are not 'prisoners of war' or 'criminals', what are they? To simply call them 'detainees' or 'unlawful combatants' is to fudge the issue and to say nothing. All right-thinking people know that all this is an outrage to all that is decent in any country claiming to be a democracy. The 'war on terror' is itself terrifying. In the name of freedom, freedom itself is under its most serious threat. In a just world, Bush, and for that matter, Blair, would be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The investigation by Panorama was a powerful eye-opener. The arguments of the American military personnel at both Guantanamo and Bagram did not stand up to objective scrutiny. The blatant propaganda in the form of 'movies' pumped into the minds of young impressionable soldiers guarding Guantanamo bordered on the horrifying. The lawyers for the current U.S. government make only one statement: 'America is right'. But self-righteousness has never been an argument in favour of abandoning the rule of law and it should not become one now. Will the Panorama investigation be shown on American TV? In a supposedly democratic country, all these wrongs are ultimately the responsibility of the U.S. people to resolve. So are they being informed, either by this programme, or similar ones from U.S. broadcasters, or do they just not care? Or, perhaps, the power to do anything has been usurped and taken out of the hands of ordinary American people? NOTES: Selected
foreign terrorism suspects in custody of the United States government who
are unresponsive to interrogations are covertly 'rendered' to foreign countries
for further questioning. [Washington Post, 3/11/2002; Washington Post,
5/11/2004; The New York Times, 3/9/2003 Sources: Unnamed U.S. officials]
The countries receiving the rendered suspects are often known human rights
violators like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, which have
histories of using torture and other unlawful methods of interrogation.
The rendition program often ignores local and international extradition
laws. [Washington Post, 3/11/2002 Sources: Unnamed US officials] In fact,
US officials have admitted that the justification for rendition is sometimes
fabricated—the US requests that a suspect be rendered, and then the allied
foreign government charges the person "with a crime of some sort." [Washington
Post, 12/26/2002; Los Angeles Times, 2/1/2003 Sources: Unnamed U.S. officials]
After a suspect is relocated to another country, U.S. intelligence agents
may “remain closely involved” in the interrogations, sometimes even “doing
[them] together” with the foreign government's intelligence service. The
frequency of renditions will increase dramatically after the September
11 attacks (see (September 11, 2001-2004)). [Washington Post, 3/11/2002;
Washington Post, 5/11/2004; The New York Times, 3/9/2003 Sources: Unnamed
U.S. officials]
Some of the above material is based on the Panorama investigation shown of BBC TV on Sunday, 5th October 2003, 'Inside Guantanamo'
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