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Guantanamo: What the World Should Know

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published July 05, 2004

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( 5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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<<>>The U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is "like Dante's ninth circle of hell," human rights lawyer Michael Ratner claims in his new book.

In Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, Ratner describes abominable conditions at the detention center and in a Q&A with writer Ellen Ray argues that the terrorism suspects incarcerated on the island should have access to U.S. courts.

As expected, the book has been taken over by events. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo can use the U.S. justice system to challenge their detentions.

But the book is still relevant for anyone interested in the alleged abuses at Guantanamo and in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and Bagram in Afghanistan. The authors speculated on the rulings, but decided to go to press before they were announced.

Ratner, who represents two Australian detainees at Guantanamo through his organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, claims in the 93-page book that U.S. President George W. Bush has abused his executive power by locking people up without charges and denying them a day in court.

Ratner's claims are based on interviews with detainees released from Guantanamo. He has not been to the island since the 1990s, when he represented Haitian boatpeople held at Guantanamo.

Ray and Ratner present an impassioned argument about why Americans should care about what happens to the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo, which he calls "a prison where cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment - even torture - is practiced, and it is utterly illegal."

"That you can take someone and put him in a prison offshore with no legal rights whatsoever for two and a half years is simply inhuman," he says in the book. The alleged abuses at Guantanamo and in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan send a message to the Muslim world, he says, and Americans should worry about how their sons and daughters will be treated if they are captured overseas. If you abuse prisoners, he argues, American captives are more likely to be tortured.

Ratner blames the abuse scandals in Abu Ghraib on an abuse of executive power in the United States. He believes the executive office has too much power and that the American system of checks and balances on the president has eroded since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Ratner says released inmates have complained about being chained to the floor naked, denied food and humiliated in front of female guards. Guards threaten detainee's families and are deprived of sleep. The prison is rat-infested and oppressively hot, he says.

Ratner says the confessions from people at Guantanamo are "garbage" because people will say anything if you deny them food, beat them and threaten their loved ones.

Most of the 595 "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo are being held without charge. They are suspected of supporting al-Qaida or of fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Because of the shroud of secrecy in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Ratner often speculates about why detainees and U.S. officials do things. His theories are often hard to believe.

He argues that the U.S. government uses released prisoners as informants and speculates that the Iraq abuse photos were taken to possibly blackmail people in the future.

"One possible reason that pictures of abuse were taken in Iraq was as a means to blackmail informants - to insure that they would do their jobs as informants, on pain of release of the embarrassing photos."

Ratner is an expert on Guantanamo and the book is full of detailed accounts of abuse. But because the book is in Q&A form, it sometimes feels confusing and repetitive. The format makes it hard to get a sense of the former detainees, because it jumps from player to player.

Also, Ray is a friend of Ratner's and a sympathetic audience, so the Q&A is never combative, or even tough. Both Ray and Ratner are outraged that the people at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been denied access to lawyers for over two years.

On June 28th of this year, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners could challenge the legitimacy of planned trials before U.S. military tribunals - the first of their kind since World War II.

Ratner says the tribunals are unfair because the judge and jury are both chosen by the Bush administration, not the legislative and judicial branches of government.

"These are executive courts, set up by the president to try people the president designates for trial," he says. "The president and the Pentagon have decided that they will define the crimes, prosecute people, adjudicate guilt, and dispense punishment. This is unchecked rule by the executive branch. It dispenses entirely with our system of checks and balances."

Ratner says Bush's behavior is "medieval."

The Bush administration says the military tribunals are in the best interests of national security.

Ratner says allegations of abuse coming out of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram are consistent - the use of "short-shackling, chaining to the floor, stripping and stress-and-duress physical positions" — indicating a systematic problem and not just a few bad soldiers, as the Bush administration has claimed.

Ratner says that people are being tortured at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram and that the harsh interrogation methods will backfire and make life more dangerous for Americans everywhere.

"Muslims and people of Arab ethnicity are angry and inflamed by what is being done to their people," he says in the book. "They are not going to cooperate; worse, they are going to turn against you. So even from a pragmatic point of view, there is a strong basis for opposing torture under any circumstance.

"Apart from its ineffectiveness and illegality, torture is one of the cruelest, and most dangerous things that the United States can be doing. The claim that torture should somehow be justified is really an attack on the very dignity of humanity. It sinks us all to an inhuman and uncivilized level. It debases the victim and the torturer. In the end torture destroys everything we value as human beings."
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  6. Guantanamo: What the World Should Know

published July 05, 2004

( 5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Related

9/11 to Abu Ghraib: The Chain of Command in US Military Prisoner Abuse

9/11 to Abu Ghraib: The Chain of Command in US Military Prisoner Abuse

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