Meanwhile, Back At The Gulag

by digby

We knew this, but it’s still good that the AP is investigating and reporting it:

The Pentagon called them “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth,” sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba.

Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for “continued detention.”

And then set free.

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed, or whether some of America’s staunchest allies have set terrorists and militants free.

[…]

But through interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo. The investigation, which spanned 17 countries, found:

Once the detainees arrived in other countries, 205 of the 245 were either freed without being charged or were cleared of charges related to their detention at Guantanamo. Forty either stand charged with crimes or continue to be detained.

Only a tiny fraction of transferred detainees have been put on trial. The AP identified 14 trials, in which eight men were acquitted and six are awaiting verdicts. Two of the cases involving acquittals — one in Kuwait, one in Spain — initially resulted in convictions that were overturned on appeal.

[…]

Overall, about 165 Guantanamo detainees have been transferred from Guantanamo for “continued detention,” while about 200 were designated for immediate release. Some 420 detainees remain at the U.S. base in Cuba.

Clive Stafford Smith, a British-American attorney representing several detainees, said the AP’s findings indicate that innocent men were jailed and that the term “continued detention” is part of “a politically motivated farce.”

“The Bush administration wants to be able to say that these are dangerous terrorists who are going to be confined upon their release … although there is no evidence against many of them,” he said.

[…]

The United States insists that the fact that so many of the former detainees have been freed by other countries doesn’t mean they weren’t dangerous.

“They were part of Taliban, al-Qaida, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.

But Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer representing several detainees, says the fact that hundreds of men have been released into freedom belies their characterization by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

“After all, it would simply be incredible to suggest that the United States has voluntarily released such ‘vicious killers’ or that such men had been miraculously reformed at Guantanamo,” Colangelo-Bryan said.

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a nation that has more people in jail than totalitarian communist China (which has four times our population), would do such a thing, but it still is. I can only assume that these officials think throwing innocent people in jail to be tortured and driven half mad is just the price that these people have to pay for being the wrong nationality, race or religion.

And they’ve assigned another psychopath to run the place:

As the first detainees began moving last week into Guantánamo’s modern, new detention facility, Camp 6, the military guard commander stood beneath the high, concrete walls of the compound, looking out on a fenced-in athletic yard.

The yard, where the detainees were to have played soccer and other sports, had been part of a plan to ease the conditions under which more than 400 men are imprisoned here, nearly all of them without having been charged. But that plan has changed.

“At this point, I just don’t see using that,” the guard commander, Col. Wade F. Dennis, said.

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

Admiral Harris, who took command on March 31, referred in part to the recent departure from Guantánamo of the last of 38 men whom the military had classified since early 2005 as “no longer enemy combatants.” Still, about 100 others who had been cleared by the military for transfer or release remained here while the State Department tried to arrange their repatriation.

[Shortly after Admiral Harris’s remarks, another 15 detainees were sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were promptly returned to their families.]

Harris was quoted earlier saying:

MORAN: So no man who ever came to Guantanamo Bay came there by mistake [or] was innocent?

HARRIS: I believe that to be true

Admiral Harris also thinks that these prisoners are committing an act of terrorism when they commit suicide. I guess the logic is that embarrassment for the United States government is equivalent to the deaths of innocent people in a suicide bomb. In fact, he thinks that any resistence to their captivity is terrorism.

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can – including their own urine and faeces – to continue to wage war on the United States.

I wrote about this last fall:

When heavily guarded people in cages throwing feces is considered assymetrical warfare, we have gone down the rabbit hole. (Either that or a couple of toddlers I know are in training to be the next Osama bin Laden.) Does this man think he’s actually fighting terrorists down there?

The men being held in Guantanamo might have been terrorists, but when they are under the total control of the most powerful military in the world they are most definitely not combatants, they are prisoners. It’s not an act of war to dislike your jailers or resist your imprisonment. That’s absurd.

According to the NY Times today, Harris has really straightened things out down there:

Several military officials said Admiral Harris took over the Guantánamo task force with a greater concern about security, and soon ordered his aides to draw up plans to deal with hostage-takings and other emergencies.

He and Colonel Dennis both asserted that Camp 4 — where dozens of detainees rioted during an aggressive search of their quarters last May — represented a particular danger.

Admiral Harris said detainees there had used the freedom of the camp to train one another in terrorist tactics, and in 2004 plotted unsuccessfully to seize a food truck and use it to run over guards.

“Camp 4 is an ideal planning ground for nefarious activity,” he said.

But according to several recent interviews with military personnel who served here at the time, the riot in May did not transpire precisely as military officials had described it. The disturbance culminated with what the military had said was an attack by detainees on members of a Quick Reaction Force that burst into one barracks to stop a detainee who appeared to be hanging himself.

But officers familiar with the event said the force stormed in after a guard saw a detainee merely holding up a sheet and that his intentions were ambiguous. A guard also mistakenly broadcast the radio code for multiple suicide attempts, heightening the alarm, the officers said.

“Nefarious activity?” They send in one more bizarre, psychotic warden down there after another. Maybe that’s the only kind of person who is willing to do it.

We know that they paid bounties in Afghanistan to rival clans who sold out their enemies who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. We know that they knew this very early on and yet kept the prisoners there for years. There may very well still be some of those guys down there. Some of them mayh ave died in prison or killed themselves.

We know that they used the prison as a training camp for green, unskilled interrogators. We know they used excessive force and violence and even blinded prisoners with pepper spray. There has been sexual humiliation and torture.

Even a guard suffered a brain injury while pretending to be an inmate in a training exercise.

Guantanamo is a stain on America that is going to haunt us forever. Its very existence is an affront to the constitution upon which our government is built and the philosophy of human rights that inform it. For years now we’ve known what was happening down there and yet it still continues. In fact, from today’s report, it’s taken a recent turn for the worse. I can hardly believe it.

All the sordid evidence of Guantanamo abuse is laid out here and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Amnesty has more.

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