More than four years after Barack Obama pledged to close the US internment camp at Guantanamo, over half of its 166 inmates are on hunger strike — 16 are being violently force fed and soldiers last week used rubber bullets against “noncompliant” prisoners. Guantanamo, along with Abu Ghraib, long ago became a symbol of the lawless brutality of George W. Bush’s “war on terror”.
Set up on US-occupied Cuban territory, it was filled with supposed “enemy combatants” seized in post-invasion Afghanistan, the vast majority of whom were then held without charge or trial, brutalised and tortured. All that was supposed to have come to an end after Obama’s election. However, instead of shutting this monstrosity, the camp is being rebuilt. Congress has played a central role in keeping Guantanamo open, but the president only tried to move it to Illinois, not end the scandal of indefinite detention without trial. And he has personally blocked the release of dozens of prisoners, even when they have been cleared.
That is at the heart of why the detainees are striking. Among them is Shaker Aamer, a Saudi-born British resident held without charge for 11 years, much of it in solitary confinement. As with half of the rest of the prisoners, the US authorities now accept that there is no case against him and he was cleared for release six years ago. Aamer has not seen his family since 2001 and has never met his 11-year-old son, Faris. He has refused food for 71 days and his case is due to be debated in British parliament in response to a petition of more than 100,000 names.
However, it now turns out that, uniquely among the prisoners, Aamer has been cleared for release to only one country: Saudi Arabia. As Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, puts it: “The sole reason to send Shaker to Saudi Arabia is to have him silenced, most likely by sentencing him to a long imprisonment after a sham trial.”
The reason is not hard to find. Soon after he was seized, Aamer says he was assaulted and tortured (into falsely confessing links to Al Qaida) by US officials at Bagram air base in Afghanistan in the presence of MI6 officers — abuse that continued at Guantanamo. Even more dangerously, he was also present, along with British intelligence agents, when Ibn Al Shaikh Al Libi was tortured at Bagram into alleging that Saddam Hussain was training Al Qaida terrorists — bogus claims that Bush and Colin Powell used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
The Metropolitan police has now opened three new investigations into UK intelligence collusion with torture and “rendition”, including Aamer’s case. That is on top of MI6’s role in the kidnapping of Libyan dissidents and their families in 2004, for which the government has already paid out more than £2 million (Dh11.25 million) in compensation. Earlier this month, Scotland Yard detectives interviewed Aamer in Guantanamo. No wonder the British government is so keen to force through secret court hearings in “national security” cases through its justice and security bill or that it has struggled to convince the courts that the Salafist cleric Abu Qatada, regularly detained without charge for years, will not be at risk of torture if packed off to a police state such as Jordan.[The British government announced Wednesday that it had signed a new legal assistance treaty with Jordan that would help to deport Abu Qatada later this year].
The scale of torture, kidnapping and detention without trial unleashed by the US government after 9/11 is, as the US Constitution Project report found last week, was “indisputable”. At least 54 states, including Britain and 24 others in Europe, took part in the CIA’s secret “extraordinary rendition” programme, it has now emerged. And British forces have carried out plenty of beatings and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq themselves, either on their own or in cahoots with US and local forces, as multiple reports and inquiries have made clear.
It is hardly surprising in the wake of such a saga that western claims to be the champions of human rights and humanitarian intervention are treated with derision across much of the world. However, as its dirty secrets are seeping out, the “war on terror” itself has already mutated.
Obama has not closed Guantanamo or held those who authorised these barbarities to account, but US torture camps and boots on the ground are on the way out. Their place has been taken by air and proxy campaigns, such as in Libya and Syria, and drone wars that have killed thousands in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
We do not yet know the motivations of the two men accused of carrying out the Boston bombings, which killed three people and seriously injured many more. But we do know that 61 were killed the same day in bomb attacks in Iraq that were blamed on Al Qaida, brought to the country by the US-British invasion. And 16 were killed in Pakistan the following day in a suicide attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban, which mushroomed as a result of the invasion of Afghanistan.
What is certain is that so long as the US and its allies intervene, occupy and wage war across the Arab and Muslim world, such outrages will continue. It has the logic of a “war of terror” without end.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
