The simple answer would be: because Guantanamo is still open, and is a constant reminder of the lawlessness of the Bush administration. Several books have been published dealing with the Gitmo issue, reflecting still on Abu Ghraib, that stain on the forehead of this administration. One of them has not been published yet. It is The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison by Andy Worthington and will be published in October 07 by Pluto Press. In the meantime, Worthington created a website following the stories of the detainees from the time his book ended.
The Guantánamo Files allows the prisoners to tell their own stories, explaining who they are and the circumstances of their capture. In contrast to the administration’s claims that they are the ‘worst of the worst,’ what the stories reveal most of all is that very few of them had anything to do with al-Qaeda, and the vast majority were either Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war in Afghanistan that began long before 9/11, or humanitarian aid workers, religious teachers and economic migrants, who were, for the most part, sold to the Americans by their allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Indeed. Same story in Abu Ghraib and in other prisons. How can we forget al Jazeera’s Sami al Haj – deprived of seeing his son growing up for no other reason than that he works for al Jazeera? This will be a worthwhile book.
In any case, in the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, reminds us once again of General Taguba who first investigated the Abu Ghraib prison and who wrote the famous report known after his name, the Taguba Report. Hersh conducted several interviews with General Taguba in which he acknowledged that when he undertook the task of writing the report, he knew it would impact his career negatively.
He said Rumsfeld was in denial. He did not want to see the report nor the photographs. Hersh says:
I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.
While everyone was denying any knowledge of the matter,
Taguba came to believe that Lieutenant General Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, and some of the generals assigned to the military headquarters in Baghdad had extensive knowledge of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib even before Joseph Darby came forward with the CD. Taguba was aware that in the fall of 2003—when much of the abuse took place—Sanchez routinely visited the prison, and witnessed at least one interrogation. According to Taguba, “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on.”
Hersh adds:
Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.
And then in January 2006 General Taguba received a phone call telling him to retire. He has no doubt in his mind that the higher officials, including the President, knew about the abuse. Taguba says:
“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”
Another book has also been published by Carroll & Graf. The author is Tara McKelvey, and the book is entitled Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. She also wrote an article about the book and her findings in the American Prospect. The author traces the footsteps of Provance, one of the Abu Ghraib whistleblowers, and others as well. Provance sent her CDs and videos of the events at Abu Ghraib. She writes:
From September 2003 to February 2004, Provance says he saw how detainees were mistreated at Abu Ghraib: A 16-year-old boy, for example, was hooded, shackled, and interrogated not because he knew anything about the insurgency but because it would upset an Iraqi general, Hamid Zabar, who was his father. Provance also heard about beatings and assaults of other detainees. He reported the abuses, but he says no one aggressively pursued the leads. Out of frustration, he agreed to appear on ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings on May 18, 2004.
Three days later, Provance was reprimanded, he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill at a briefing, “Protecting National Security Whistleblowers in the Post-9/11 Era,” for the House Committee on Government Reform on February 14, 2006. “There were all sorts of intimidating acts against him,” says Scott Horton, a human-rights lawyer who met with Provance in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2004. “His commander wanted to court-martial him.”
No difference between Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo:
Seventy to ninety percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, according to an October 2003 International Committee of the Red Cross report and sworn statements made by members of the 470th Military Intelligence Group, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, and the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, were arrested by mistake or had no intelligence value.
When Provance returned to the US, no one understood his urge to become a whistleblower:
“When I came back here, I got 21 questions. People were trying to tell me they know more about Abu Ghraib than I do. I’m like, ‘You work at Value City.’ One of them — well, she was like, ‘There are people who want to get on with their lives and, there are people like you who want to keep bringing this shit up.’”
“I’m like, it’s not just Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t just a few bad apples or an outbreak of sadism. It was policy. Those MPs thought what they were doing was acceptable. So acceptable that they would use them as wallpaper for their laptops. It wasn’t just mischievousness. A kid goes over there and busts glass out — ” he points to the First Federal Savings across the street — “and he’s not going to take a picture of himself doing it and mail it to his parents.”
It takes courage of soldiers and generals and people to come forward with what they know will impact their future and their careers. It takesan enormous amount of courage to stand up and say that something is very wrong, that the moral compass has been lost and with it the credibility of a powerful country like the US. Abu Ghraib will not go away as long as there are other Abu Ghraibs out there, as long as Gitmo is open, as long as rendition continues, as long as those responsible have not been brought to justice and as long as this administration remains unremorseful in its delusions.
It is ironic that in the conference on Democracy and Security that took place in Prague June 5-6 of this year and which President Bush gave the opening speech, the Prague charter states:
Whereas we recognize that there is a profound moral difference between free societies and societies ruled by fear and repression where human rights are systematically abused and where there is no recourse to correct those abuses;
Whereas we recognize that the protection of human rights is critical to international peace and security and that countries that do not respect the rights of their people are unlikely to respect the rights of their neighbors;
Whereas we are committed to building and maintaining free societies through non-violent, democratic means;
Whereas we believe that the free world can play a critical role in helping those who are struggling for freedom in non-democratic countries;
We, the undersigned, have gathered together in Prague in the spring of 2007 in order to call upon governments and peoples throughout the free world to help those trying to build free societies elsewhere by doing the following:
1. To demand the immediate unconditional release of all non violent political prisoners in their respective countries.
2. Instructing diplomatic emissaries to non-democratic countries to actively and openly seek out meetings with political prisoners and dissidents committed to building free societies through non-violence.
3. Raising public awareness, through institutions in their own countries and through international bodies, of human rights abuses under non-democratic regimes.
What about human rights abuses under ‘democratic regimes’? how long will those go unrecognized and unpunished????
I am currently reading a very insightful book called Mission al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World by a former US marine-turned -alJazeera-correspondent Josh Rushing. The book has just been released this month, but I was unaware that there had been attacks against its author prior to that ever since he joined al Jazeera, and he has been called – by who else but Fox News! – a traitor [
