Bush and his torture chambers

The President's capitulation to an amendment on the treatment of prisoners is a setback for him, but indications are that international laws will not stop him from waging his "war against terror".

FINALLY the American public and lawmakers seem to have woken up to the fact that their government has been practising torture on prisoners detained by its secret services. On December 16, under bipartisan pressure in the United States Congress, President George W. Bush agreed to back a Bill proposed by Republican Senator John McCain banning "the cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Until then the White House had refused to backtrack on the issue and had even threatened to veto the McCain measure.

The American media has described the passing of the McCain provision as a serious political setback for the President. Vice-President Dick Cheney, dubbed the "Vice President of Torture" by The New York Times, had lobbied hard to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the provisions of the legislation.

The use of torture by U.S. forces had earned worldwide notoriety after pictures of Iraqis being humiliated at the Abu Ghraib prison were published. Since then, there have been credible reports about the torture of detainees in Guantanamo Bay and U.S.-supervised prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In early 2005, more stories emerged about innocent civilians being picked up by American agents from various parts of the world and dispatched to Poland, Romania and other "friendly" countries for interrogation.

It is evident that after the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration went about doing whatever it pleased in the name of the "war against terror". If reports in the Western media are to be believed, Bush wanted to bomb the headquarters of the Arabic language broadcaster Al Jazeera. The Bush administration was unhappy with its coverage of the Iraq war. The U.S. military had already targeted its offices in Kabul and Baghdad in 2002 and 2003. In April 2004, U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced the satellite television station for broadcasting "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable lies".

It has now been revealed that even U.S. citizens were not exempt from intrusive and illegal surveillance by the government. Electronic mails and telephone conversations of a large number of people, including those involved in the anti-war movement, were put under government surveillance. In 1978, the U.S. Congress had passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which prohibited the President from ordering wiretaps on his own initiative. Until the 1970s, the government routinely ran wiretaps on its own citizens, including prominent people such as the late civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Junior.

The formal acceptance of the McCain proposal by the Bush administration does not mean that the U.S. government has decided to revert to civilised behaviour in the treatment of incarcerated persons, lodged in secret prisons around the globe. The Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez was quick to clarify that the Bush administration used a different yardstick while defining what constitutes "torture". He said that torture meant the intentional infliction of "severe" physical or mental harm. What was unsaid was that the CIA and other American security agencies would retain the right to use torture, albeit less physical, in the war against terrorism. According to American civil rights activists, U.S. agencies may no longer resort to crude physical torture but would now rely more on sophisticated mental torture, like playing non-stop high decibel rock music and depriving prisoners of sleep.

Many commentators and analysts in the U.S. are of the opinion that the Bush-McCain "compromise" is a charade to mislead international public opinion. The Bush administration has not defined what constitutes "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment". Article 3 of the Geneva Convention prohibits not merely torture, but also any cruel, inhuman, degrading and humiliating treatment of a detainee "in all circumstances". According to tenets of international law there is no immunity or exceptions, as the Bush administration is claiming. U.S. legal experts have noted that Bush has not withdrawn a February 7, 2002 memorandum authorising the denial of legal rights and protection under the Geneva Convention to civilians and combatants arrested in the war against terrorism.

It is therefore no surprise that the Bush administration's protestations against condoning the use of torture has very few takers. During the recent visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to European capitals, the media questioned her on the issue. Her constant refrain was that "America does not torture". She was in Berlin and London when the story about the U.S. using European territory to transport prisoners in 2003 became headline news. European "plane-spotters" provided proof of aircraft chartered by the CIA making hundreds of landings in major airports, ferrying "prisoners" to torture chambers in Poland, Romania and other countries.

European civil rights groups have also gathered plenty of evidence to prove that the U.S. illegally held detainees in several European countries. It has now become clear that several West European governments were aware of the U.S. "torture" practices for quite some time. It was the European media that highlighted the issue, much to the embarrassment of the governments of the United Kingdom and Germany. The European Union (E.U.) and some European governments have started their own investigations. During her visit Rice implied that the governments in Berlin and London were aware of the clandestine CIA activities on their soil.

In the first week of December, a German newspaper, Berliner Zeitung, reported that European governments had silently aided and abetted the Bush administration's trashing of international law. The newspaper said that European governments had prior knowledge that American agents were accompanying "suspected terrorists on there way to European and non-European torture chambers. The justifiable suspicion exists that European governments not only knew of the torture, but they also benefited from the coerced testimony so gathered." The European media have also reported that the E.U. secretly allowed the U.S. to transport "criminals" from its soil.

The case of Khaled El-Masri is an illustration. On December 2003, while on a trip to Macedonia, the German citizen was detained. The Macedonian police handed him over to the Americans. Giving a first-person account of his experiences in The Los Angeles Times, Masri says that his American interrogators tortured him in a Macedonian prison before forcibly taking him to Afghanistan where he was kept in solitary confinement for more than four months. The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said in a report released in the third week of December that the CIA operated "prisons of darkness" in Afghanistan; the inmates were chained to the walls, deprived of food and drinking water. According to the HRW, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was not given permission to inspect the prison.

Masri was not allowed to communicate with his family in Germany while he was under American custody. He was finally let out but his captors and their collaborators made sure that their tracks were covered. Masri was flown handcuffed and blindfolded and dumped in Albania where the local immigration authorities arrested him. He was later put on a plane to Germany by the Albanian authorities. Masri, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, is suing the U.S. government. "I sued the American government because I believed what happened to me was illegal and should not be done to others. And I believe the American people, when they hear my story, will agree," wrote Masri.

Condoleeza Rice, alluding to the Masri case, said "any policy will sometimes result in errors". She refused to acknowledge the Bush administration's policy of "extraordinary rendition", whereby people are picked up from various parts of the world on the basis of mere suspicion and taken to countries where the victims do not have the protection of the law. In the light of the recent revelations, the U.S. Senate is expected to pass a resolution that will require the Bush administration to provide detailed information about the secret detention facilities outside the country.

It is unlikely that President Bush is going to yield substantially on the twin issues of torture and domestic eavesdropping. The White House continues to maintain that international laws and treaties will not stop the President from conducting his "war against terror". A White House memorandum dated September 25, 2001, stated that statutes passed by the Congress "cannot place any limits on the President's determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing and nature of response".

As Harold Pinter pointed out in his Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, the U.S. "no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply does not care a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant." Pinter in his brilliant speech said that what the U. S. is doing in Guantanamo and other prisons is in defiance of the Geneva Convention. He described it as a "criminal outrage" committed by a country that describes itself as the "leader of the free world".