Guantanamo Gulag in the Context of Global War

Gitmo: torture the powerless while bowing to the emperor

Tahir Mahmoud

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once made the claim that the illegally occupied US-run Guantanamo Bay torture camp (aka Gitmo) held “the worst of the worst” terrorists. Those who watched CNN and other corporate Western media outlets when the gulag was just being erected will remember how they painted the detainees as absolute barbarians. Their line that “they deserve it,” was widely projected.

Today, the same corporate media that eagerly legitimized US aggression against Afghanistan and the need for a torture camp like Gitmo has changed its tune. Now it carries reports discussing violations of human rights of the remaining detainees at the Gitmo torture camp. Why did the propaganda machinery of Western neocolonialism change its tune? The answer is simple. The hard facts that the vast majority of detainees at Gitmo were simply caught up in the wrong place at wrong time became undeniable.

According to the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report of June 2018, “at least 780 people have been held at Guantanamo, the vast majority without charge or trial. Nine detainees have died there, six from suspected suicide. The US has transferred 732 to home or third countries, 533 during the George W. Bush regime and 144 during Barack Obama’s. Only one detainee has been released during the regime of current US President Donald Trump. Far from closing it, he has said he would like to lock up more people there, no doubt innocents, but ones who are opposed to US aggression worldwide.

On his second day in office in January 2009, Obama had promised to close Gitmo but by the end of his second term, 41 detainees still remained, including five that his regime had “designated for release.”

The above data from HRW clearly points to the fact that most of the people detained at Guantanamo Bay had nothing to do with terrorism. What is more horrifying about the data is the fact that the detainees were subjected to kangaroo style military courts, with minimum legal rights and still nothing could be pinned on them. Many American civil rights lawyers and activists have denounced the Gitmo military tribunal as a travesty of justice.

In 2008, the drumbeater for US military adventurism worldwide, Foreign Policy magazine, acknowledged, “Guantanamo has been a powerful recruitment tool for extremists and a stain on the reputation of the United States. Now we can say, with little doubt, that it did not even serve to remove terrorists or insurgents from the battlefield.” The bulletin magazine of US foreign policy of course put a “soft” spin on this crime by stating that “almost all of the detainees were turned over to US forces… for a hefty bounty or reward… contrary to standard law enforcement practice, the US military accepted the uncorroborated allegations of the award claimants with little independent investigation.”

While the story of the Guantanamo torture camp has gained worldwide attention, the wider phenomenon of US involvement in arbitrary imprisonment is being ignored. For decades Washington has been facilitating detention of innocent people in the Muslim world. The US role in training Savak, the notorious secret police of the Shah’s regime in Iran is widely known, but that is not the only locale the US was and is involved in detention and torture of innocent people. Washington outsources the dirty work of torture to illegitimate regimes it sustains in power throughout the Muslim world.

Only recently Trump referred to ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi as “my favorite dictator” during the G7 conference in France (August 24–26). This is something the world should be glad about, as Trump’s blatant stupidity has its positive side. It exposes the true colors of the US empire.

Washington’s torture industry is not only active in the Muslim world; it perfected its torture techniques in South America through the training facility located in Georgia, ironically called the School of the Americas (SOA). According to Ramona Wadi, a freelance journalist, a 2014 analysis by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Colombia-Europe-US Human Rights Observatory, found that “out of 25 Colombian graduates from 2001 to 2003, 12 had either been charged with ‘a serious crime or commanded units whose members had reportedly committed multiple extrajudicial killings.’”

The current detainees at Guantanamo gulag seem to be held not because of any credible evidence, but simply because the guards and managers at the torture camp do not like their non-compliant attitude. According to HRW, based on the latest information available, currently 40 people are held at the US-run gulag, two remain imprisoned after trial or accepted plea agreements with Guantanamo’s military commissions.

The Guantanamo saga is not merely the manifestation of Washington’s brutality; it is one of its many displays. Thus, when covering the abuses at Guantanamo, it is essential to address the root cause, which is the illegality of the US war on Afghanistan and its political background.

The corporate Western media conveniently ignores the fact that US Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel made several well-publicized trips to Kabul in September 1996 and in 1998. This was long after Osama bin Laden was wanted by the US and Washington knew that he was in Afghanistan. In December 1997, a delegation of Taliban representatives was invited to the US to meet officials from the US oil company, UNOCAL. Given the US’ close relationship with Pakistani government officials and the Saudi regime, the Americans never requested the Taliban for Bin Laden’s extradition during that time. Even if the US did ask for extradition in 2001, of which there is little evidence barring Bush’s arrogant demand that the Taliban hand over Osama, Afghanistan did not have any extradition treaty with the US at the time.

Why did the US launch a war against Afghanistan for the 9/11 attacks when none of the perpetrators identified by the US was an Afghan citizen? According to the US, of the 19 alleged attackers, 15 were Saudis, two Emiratis, one Egyptian and one Lebanese. If there is one place the US army should have gone after, it should have been the palaces of the Saudi royals in Riyadh. Thus, when reporting about the Gitmo torture camp, this wider picture should never be ignored; it must be brought forward and highlighted.

Trump administration threatens sanctions against International Criminal Court

By Patrick Martin

The Trump administration announced that it would retaliate against the International Criminal Court (ICC), a judicial panel established under the auspices of the United Nations, if the ICC took any action against US military or civilian officials over charges of war crimes in Afghanistan.

The announcement was made by National Security Advisor John Bolton in a speech to the Federalist Society, the corporate-financed association of ultra-right lawyers and judges that has vetted President Trump’s two nominations to the US Supreme Court.

Bolton took the occasion of an appearance before a group of lawyers to declare the US government’s defiance of any constraint on its actions under international law, which he characterized as an attack on American sovereignty. His main concern was not so much for front-line soldiers, as for the decision-makers, from military commanders on the battlefield to war planners and strategists in Washington, right up to the White House itself, who he said were in danger of being “intimidated” by the threat of war crimes charges.

In rejecting the ICC the Trump administration has not adopted a new policy. When the body was first created in 2002 under an accord signed in Rome, the Bush administration repudiated it, and Congress quickly passed legislation by huge bipartisan margins. The new law, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, had as its goal “to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not a party.” Subsequent events demonstrated why the Bush Administration repudiated the ICC. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in a criminal war of aggression launched on the basis of lies. As a direct consequence of the invasion, over a million Iraqis were killed, and the United Sates military engaged in sadistic torture and murder on a massive scale.

The Obama administration upheld this law as well, and Bolton hailed it, joking that it had been widely dubbed The Hague Invasion Authorization Act, since it approved in advance the use of military force to free any US citizens facing charges before the ICC, which sits in The Hague, Netherlands.

The national security advisor outlined further actions that the Trump administration was prepared to carry out in the event the ICC decided to act on a request filed in November 2017 for an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by outside forces, including Americans. The ICC has been collecting evidence on torture in US, NATO and Afghan government detention centers since 2007, without taking any action thus far, an indication of the impotence of such bodies when faced with opposition by the major imperialist powers.

These actions would include denying entry to the United States for members and employees of the ICC, financial sanctions against ICC judges and staff if they have assets in the US financial system, and the bringing of criminal charges under US law. In other words, anyone who would dare to investigate US war crimes overseas could find themselves sitting in a US jail, or even in a detention center like Guantanamo Bay, treated like a “terrorist.”

In perhaps the most revealing passage of his 30-minute speech, Bolton outlined what he said were five fundamental defects of the International Criminal Court. The second “defect” was that crimes of aggression were defined too vaguely. He declared that, if the ICC had been in existence during World War II, it would have found the Allies guilty of war crimes for the bombing of Germany and Japan—the deliberate creation of firestorms in Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo and other cities, in which hundreds of thousands died, and the nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bolton objects to such methods being called by their right names—war crimes—because he represents a government that has already tested out such methods, in Mosul, Raqqa and other cities, and is preparing to do so on a much vaster scale, including giant metropolises like Moscow and Beijing.

Bolton paired the declaration of war on the ICC with a directive to close the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization because the Palestinian Authority has brought charges before the ICC over the usurper Israel’s building of illegal settlements on the West Bank on land seized from Palestinian farmers.

While Bolton ridiculed the ICC as an illegitimate body that was grossly exceeding its authority, he was silent on the real target of the Trump administration’s wrath: the 123 member states that participate in the ICC and accept its jurisdiction. This includes every nation in Latin America except Nicaragua, every Caribbean state except Cuba and Haiti, every European country except Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and Pacific states like Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea.

US National Security Advisor John Bolton asserted that states comprising two-thirds of the world’s population and 70 percent of the world’s military force were outside the ICC, without mentioning that this consists mainly of the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, the countries of southeast Asia (most under military or Stalinist dictatorship) and nearly all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa. This list includes an array of savage US-backed dictatorships, which engage in everyday violations of human rights on a mass scale, through torture, imprisonment and executions.

In threatening the ICC, the Trump administration is not merely defying an international tribunal initially sanctioned by Washington. It is effectively laying down the law to what once were the closest allies or client states of American imperialism: the NATO countries, the Latin American countries, and the countries of the Pacific Rim. If they cross the United States, they will be dealt with savagely.

In the person of Trump, Bolton & Co., American imperialism is dropping the pretense of the United States as the advocate of international law, a political posture that, however false, was of enormous significance in the historical period following World War II. Instead, Trump’s America is a nakedly predatory imperialist power, openly seeking domination over all others, flouting international law and democratic scruples whenever the interests of “America First” require it to do so. And despite their occasional protests, there is no significant dissent from the Democratic Party against this stance of defiance of international law and any accountability for US troops and operatives for their actions around the world. On the contrary, the Democratic Party’s main criticism of Trump is that he has been insufficiently aggressive and unconstrained in the use of American military power, particularly in Syria, as well as on the periphery of Russia, in areas like Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic states.

That was from an article by Patrick Martin a Canadian politician, who was a member of the House of Commons of Canada from 1997 to 2015, representing the riding of Winnipeg Centre for the New Democratic Party.