Human Rights Watch blasts the US government for using torture as a method of interrogation, writes Faiza Rady "Jumah Al-Dousari, a mentally ill Bahraini national was detained at Guantanamo Bay. He used to say silly things and impersonate the soldiers. One day, he impersonated a female soldier and the Initial Reaction Force team was called. A military police sergeant did a knee drop onto Jumah's back... with his full weight of about 240 pounds... the others were punching and kicking Jumah... Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods clamped together in his stomach... The sergeant was punching him in the face... His nose was broken. He pushed his face and he smashed it into the concrete floor. There was blood everywhere." In its 2005 report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) features Jumah's story together with many other accounts of the Pentagon's flagrant human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It has been three years since the United States military built the notorious Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo. The camp consists of small cages with chain-link sides, no bathrooms, concrete floors and metal roofs. "We were not allowed any exercise at all; this meant that all day every day we were stuck in a cage of two metres by two metres. During the day we were forced to sit in the cell (we couldn't lie down) in total silence. We couldn't lean on the wire fence or stand up and walk around the cage," Asif Iqbal, a British prisoner released last year, describes the first few weeks of his incarceration in How we survived jail hell. Since then Camp X-Ray was revamped as Camp Delta an equally sinister, if more sanitary, facility. "The lights were very bright there as well. They were switched on all the time. Because of that our eyes were damaged, also from constantly having to look through the netting [i.e. the tight mesh from which the door and walls of each cell are made]," explained former Afghan prisoner Alif Khan. Although "slight" stress and duress conditions like the "bright light" regimen may sound innocuous to the lay person, it can in fact cause debilitating long-term damage like post-traumatic-stress syndromes. Former detainee Jamal Al- Harith recounts his nightmares: "I woke up last night in a fright and thought one of the guards was coming to put on my chains. I then realised that the light in the room was on. When locked up in our cages, the lights were on as well, and I thought to myself: 'You can sleep in the dark now' -- and I switched it off." "Guantanamo has become the Bermuda Triangle of human rights. Basic rights vanish there," said Wendy Patten, US advocacy director at HRW. While some 100 detainees have been released since last year, an estimated 550 continue to linger behind bars. Still labelled "unlawful combatants" instead of prisoners of war, and hence deprived of the protection of the Geneva Conventions, the prisoners remain in a legal black hole. Denied habeas corpus, they have never been charged with specific crimes and have no access to legal counsel. The ingenious "illegal combatant" denomination, based on the extra judicial trashing of the Geneva Conventions, was actually concocted by then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. US President George W Bush recently rewarded Gonzales for services rendered by appointing him US attorney-general. In a 25 January 2002 memo to Bush, Gonzales wrote that the war on terror requires "flexibility" and "in my judgement renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners," reported HRW. Equipped with foresight and an impeccable legal mind, Gonzales argued that the president's suspension of the Geneva Conventions was the thing to do because "it was difficult to predict with confidence how prosecutors might apply the conventions' strictures concerning outrages against personal dignity and inhuman treatment." In this context, Gonzales was evidently paving the way to human rights violations at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other less publicised US detention centres. His position was supported at the highest level of the American legal establishment. HRW reported the US Justice Department advised Gonzales in August 2002 that "torturing Al-Qaeda detainees in captivity abroad may be justified, and that international laws against torture may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations conducted in the war on terror." Given a free reign, senior officials in the Defense and Justice Departments as well as the CIA proceeded to approve a set of coercive interrogation techniques. These included stripping detainees naked during interrogation, subjecting them to extremes of heat, cold, noise and light, hooding them, depriving them of sleep and keeping them in painful positions. HRW, however, maintains that no exceptional circumstances may provide legal justification for torture. Besides being a signatory to the much-maligned Geneva Conventions, the US is also a signatory to the UN's International Convention Against Torture, the federal Torture Statute and the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights, all of which consider "the right to be free from torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as nonderogable -- meaning that it can never be suspended by a state, including during periods of public emergency." Three years on, the squabble over human rights has become academic as far as the Bush administration is concerned. Granted a new mandate, the American president is pursuing business as usual with renewed vigour. Take the prisoners' continued detention at Guantanamo, which the US government initially explained in terms of the prisoners' ostensible "intelligence value". Yet, some officials have recently admitted that this no longer holds true -- long-term incarceration having necessarily taken its toll. Still, HRW believes that the Pentagon intends to hold detainees at Guantanamo for years to come -- without charge or trial. "The Bush administration is claiming the power to lock people up without due process, possibly for the rest of their lives," said Patten. The detention centre project was conceived on a grand scale. It is estimated that at least 20 US detention centres are scattered across Afghanistan. In addition to the Bagram airbase near Kabul, there is Khost, Asadabad, Gardez, Urgon, Ghazni, Jalabad and other undisclosed locations. Although cloned after the Guantanamo model, these jails are more sinister because they are more remote and less accessible to rights organisations than occupied Cuba. HRW noted that some high-profile US-held prisoners simply "disappeared" in the vast Afghan hinterlands. "Perhaps no practice so fundamentally challenges the foundations of US and international law as the long-term secret, incommunicado detention of Al-Qaeda suspects in undisclosed locations," commented HRW. Meanwhile the Bush administration plods on, unperturbed. Thus outgoing US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told the BBC on Saturday that "torture may be used in certain cases."
