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Despite promising at the start of his presidency to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, President Obama has yet to exercise the clear independent authority to do so. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, 2009 White House counsel Gregory B. Craig and Cliff Sloan, special envoy for Guantanamo closure 2013 and 2014, urged President Obama to abandon trying to get Congressional approval.

The post The need for immediate presidential action to close Guantanamo appeared first on OUPblog.

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At long last – despite the attempts at sabotage by and over the protests of the CIA, and notwithstanding the dilatory efforts of the State Department – the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has finally issued the executive summary of its 6,300-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. We should celebrate its publication as a genuine victory for opponents of torture. We should thank Senator Dianne Feinstein (whom some of us have been known to call “the senator from the National Security Agency”) for her courage in making it happen.

Like many people, I’ve got my criticisms of the Senate report. Suffice it to say that we’ve still got work to do if we want to end US torture.

We now know something about the Senate report, but many folks may not have heard about the other torture report, the one that came out a couple of weeks ago, and was barely mentioned in the US media. In some ways, this one is even more damning. For one thing, it comes from the international body responsible for overseeing compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment – the UN Committee Against Torture. For another, unlike the Senate report, the UN report does not treat US torture as something practiced by a single agency, or that ended with the Bush administration. The UN Committee Against Torture reports on US practices that continue to this day.

Here are some key points:

• The United States still refuses to pass a law making torture a federal crime. It also refuses to withdraw some of the “reservations” it put in place when it signed the Convention. These include the insistence that only treatment resulting in “prolonged mental harm,” counts as the kind of severe mental suffering outlawed in the Convention.
• Many high civilian officials and some military personnel have not been prosecuted for acts of torture they are alleged to have committed. It would be nice, too, says the Committee, if the United States were to join the International Criminal Court, where other torturers have already been successfully tried. If we can’t prosecute them at home, maybe the international community can do it.
• The remaining 142 detainees at Guantánamo must be released or tried in civilian courts, and the prison there must be shut down.
• Evidence of US torture must be declassified, especially the torture of anyone still being held at Guantánamo.
• While the US Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations prohibits many forms of torture, a classified “annex” still permits sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. These are both forms of cruel treatment which must end.
• People held in US jails and prisons must be protected from long-term solitary confinement and rape. “Supermax” facilities and “Secure Housing Units,” where inmates spend years and even decades in complete isolation must be shut down. As many as 80,000 prisoners are believed to be in solitary confinement in US prisons today – a form of treatment we now understand can cause lasting psychosis in as short a time as two weeks.
• The United States should end the death penalty, or at the very least declare a moratorium until it can find a quick and painless method of execution.
• The United States must address out-of-control police brutality, especially “against persons belonging to certain racial and ethnic groups, immigrants and LGBTI individuals.” This finding is especially poignant in a period when we have just witnessed the failure to indict two white policemen who killed unarmed Black men: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City. Like many who have been demonstrating during the last few weeks against racially selective police violence, the Committee was also concerned about “racial profiling by police and immigration offices and growing militarization of policing activities.”

Why should an international body focused specifically on torture care about an apparently broader issue like police behavior? In fact, torture and race- or identity-based police brutality are intimately linked by the reality that lies at the foundation of institutionalized state torture.

Every nation that uses torture must first identify one or more groups of people who are torture’s “legitimate” targets. They are legitimate targets because in the minds of the torturers and of the society that gives torture a home, these people are not entirely human. (In fact, the Chilean secret police called the people they tortured “humanoids.”) Instead, groups singled out for torture are a uniquely degraded and dangerous threat to the body politic, and therefore anything “we” must do to protect ourselves becomes licit. In the United States, with lots of encouragement from the news and entertainment media, many white people believe that African American men represent this kind of unique threat. The logic that allows police to kill unarmed Black men with impunity is not all that different from the logic that produces pogroms or underlies drone assassination programs in far-off places, or that makes it impossible to prosecute our own torturers.

At 15 pages, the whole UN report is certainly a quicker read than the Senate committee’s 500-page “summary.” And it’s a good reminder that, whatever President Obama might wish, this is not the time to close the book on torture. It’s time to re-open the discussion, to hold the torturers accountable, and to bring a real end to US torture.

The post The other torture report appeared first on OUPblog.

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(first published in the UK, 2009)
Advance Reader Copy supplied by the publisher.  Due on shelves in August.

"We must remember that once we divide the world into good and bad, then we have to join one camp or the other, and, as you've found out, life's a bit more complex than that."

Funny (or not so funny) - in searching for related links, further information and other reviews on Guantanamo Boy, I actually found myself wondering (worrying?) if my every passing stop along the Internet seeking information related to Guantanamo Bay will be tracked by some government official in a cubicle somewhere.  Just the fact that such a thought crossed my mind, is an indication of the intense fear, distrust and paranoia that is gripping our world because of terrorism.  With that worldwide fear and paranoia as a backdrop for Guantanamo Boy, Anna Perera has crafted an entirely plausible story about a 15-year-old British boy, Khalid, from Rochdale, a large town in Greater Manchester, England.

Khalid is much like any other boy from his town, interested in good grades, his mates, soccer ("footy"), girls, and online gaming.  Though his family is Muslim, Khalid is a casual practitioner.  When his family visits Pakistan to assist an aunt, Khalid's father inexplicably disappears.  Khalid goes to check the address where his father was last seen, threading his way through a street protest enroute.  Unable to find his father, he returns to his aunt's home where he is later kidnapped in the late night hours,

Surely only his dad could be coming through the door without knocking this time of night?

But he's badly mistaken. Blocking the hallway is a gang of fierce-looking men dressed in dark shalwar kameez.  Black cloths wrapped around their heads.  Black gloves on their hands.  Two angry blue eyes, the rest brown, burn into Khalid as the figures move towards him like cartoon gangsters with square bodies.  Confused by the image, he staggers, bumping backwards into the wall.  Arms up to stop them getting nearer.  Too shocked and terrified to react as they shoulder him to the kitchen and close the door before pushing him to his knees and waving a gun at him as if he's a violent criminal.  Then vice-like hands clamp his mouth tight until they plaster it with duct tape.  No chance to wonder what the hell is going on, let alone scream out loud.

And so begins Khalid's descent into a frightening labyrinth of secret prisons, interrogation rooms, and finally Guantanamo Bay detention center.
A few lengthy passages are didactic in nature, but they are few in number. Khalid's unique perspective as a boy, a British citizen and non-practicing Muslim of Pakistani descent, offers a superb vantage point into the previously termed War on Terror. His sensibilities are Western, his concerns are adolescent, his perspective is that of  outsider - he has known discrimination in England, he is too Western for his Pakistani relatives, he has little in common with his fellow inmates.  Khalid is the perfect protagonist for this third-person narrative.

Heart-wrenching and frighteningly enlightening, Guantanmo Boy is not without bright spots - the power of small acts of kindness, the love of family,

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Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.  Her newest book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, is a gripping narrative account of the first 100 days at Guantanamo and an analysis of how this time set up patterns of power that would come to dominate the Bush administration’s overall strategy in the “War on Terror.”  Below is an excerpt from the very beginning of the book.  Be sure to watch tonight when Greenberg appears on The Daily Show.

Two days after Christmas, the decision was announced to the public.  Donald Rumsfeld made it official.  The new detention operation would be set up at Guantanamo Bay.  SOUTHCOM would supervise the activities on the base.  The 2nd Force Service Support Group, normally based at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, would run the effort.  It would be a joint command, combining the efforts of the various branches of the U.S. military.  The name of the joint task force would be JTF 160-the very same label that had been used for the task force during the migrant crisis.

Relying on the patriotism of the forces on the ground and their obedience to the chain of command, Secretary Rumsfeld anointed Guantanamo in defiance not just of warnings from the past, but of military professionalism.

True, the military men and women on the ground, their superiors at SOUTHCOM, the interagency group in Washington, and the Pentagon all seemed to agree with one another.  In the shadow of 9/11, they all wanted to do the patriotic thing-which in this case was to help General Franks get rid of the prisoners under his command.  But the ready assent was the beginning of a long, slow slide into an untenable and, as it would turn out, extralegal situation that would be more and more difficult to end with each phase of its existence.

But underneath the narrative of agreement lay missteps and warning signs that would come to plague Guantanamo going forward and that were apparent even before the operation was up and running.  Chief among these exceptions to the norm had been the subversion of process that had been illustrated in the exclusionary and secretive way in which the Military Order of November 13 had been drafted and turned into policy, a habit that would come to define the Bush administration through its eight years.

This bureaucratic exclusivity would grow in its destructive impact as Guantanamo came into being, but for the moment, there was a more pressing danger, one that lay outside of the usurpation of powers in Washington or the extralegal premises of Guantanamo, and one that was overlooked by those making policy in D.C.  This was the danger posed by the fact that the United States military was not quite equipped to handle the mission that was about to be handed them-that of detaining prisoners of war.  It wasn’t just that the naval base itself was being asked to perform well above its capacity in terms of resources.  It was also a matter of professional expertise.  The nation’s military did not have the requisite expertise in prisoner of war detention, as the United States had not had to deal with prisoners of war on its own since World War II.

Nor was it helpful that the military was to conduct the operation on the blueprint of migrant detention operations.  The task at hand and the professional skills readily available to the Pentagon did not match up.  The plan for the detention effort that JTF 160 was given stood on the books as a migrant crisis operation, a template that ironically had itself struggled with definitional terms when it forbade the use of the term “refugee” for the camp’s residents. Now, in the year 2001, the definition of terms was intentionally obfuscated once again.  No matter what words were used, prisoner incarceration was not equivalent to migrant detention.  Captives were neither refugees nor migrants; they demanded a whole other kind of treatment and a separate set of policies.  This lack of expertise was further hindered by the fact that the job of SOUTHCOM was to deal with the countries and of the Caribbean and Latin America and issues germane to that geographical part of the globe.  Thus, its knowledge base was largely irrelevant when it came to Middle Eastern and South Asian culture.

Though Guantanamo may have provided a legal godsend and a logistically manageable environment, deeper realities suggested that trouble lay ahead for the detention facility.  It stood not just on historical precedent and legal opportunism but on the unstable ground of secrecy, disregard for professionalism and expertise, and a legal flexibility.  The deployed of JTF 160 to Guantanamo was an emergency act, done in lieu of a better option-the least worse choice for the least worst place.

No one understood better the treacherous pragmatic-and moral-implications of sidesteppping established law and policy than the man chosen to command the detention operation there.

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Ray Yumul has proposed that the CNMI seek to be the new home of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay's facility, according to today's headline news in both the Tribune and Variety.


Gitmo is the detention facility where the US has kept suspected terrorists in conditions that have garnered international contempt. Gitmo is where the US has sunk to the levels of the terrorists themselves, with the US using torture and other illegal investigative means. President Obama has ordered the closing of Gitmo within one year.



So the question becomes what should the US do with the men who are presently imprisoned at Gitmo? Our illustrious legislator, Mr. Yumul, suggests that prisoners who will be detained after the facility's closing be transferred to the CNMI.

There's been negative comment on the proposal already. Not surprisingly. I also think the proposal has that crazy, desperate, ridiculous feel to it.

From the US's point of view: It would be expensive to send all of those men here. The CNMI has no facilities at present, meaning an expensive building plan and costly development of infrastructure. Note that the CNMI does not even have reliable power generation. This would all take time. The CNMI has inadequate manpower in both numbers and abilities. The CNMI's immigration will be newly federalized only starting 6/1/2009, so that protections and procedures will not be at their best, and existing populations will have entered without having been subjected to American immigration screening. The US is not looking to recreate the Guantanamo experience somewhere else. Distance makes oversight more difficult. The CNMI is closer to Asia, and especially to possible terrorist elements in Mindanao and Indonesia--security might be more problematic.

From the CNMI's point of view: We are desperately in need of a new image-but is being a federal prison the image we want? We have an opportunity to develop our face to the world as a place of natural physical beauty, pristine environment, rare geological features-we have a national marine monument designation to help us. An image as a new Guantanamo is strikingly at odds with that possible image. Housing terrorists isn't likely to improve our only reliable industry-tourism. We are so small that any problems with such a prison project could have huge ramifications. Our people are having a difficult time qualifying for jobs as immigration officers, how many would qualify as high-level security cleared officials in a Gitmo-like prison?

Nothing about the suggestion resonates. It all reeks. Even if Pennsylvania's John Murtha thinks it's a good idea to send them there.

What is more interesting to me, though, in the whole context of Gitmo, is the accountability of US officials for the situation. What will Obama do? What should he do? There are many ideas, but this discussion seems particularly good to me. The US must not only decide how to deal with the prisoners, but how to deal with the "leaders" who brought us to this point. And allowing war crimes to go unpunished just seems wrong to me, even if they were committed by Americans in the name of security.

jmho.

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