Gitmo - Our National Shame

[unhappycamper]

It’s About Politics, Not Values
der Standard, Austria
By Franz Eder
Translated By Ron Argentati
28 April 2011
Edited by Jade Moyano

WikiLeaks documents have exposed what goes on in America’s Guantanamo prison camp. This chapter should have ended long ago, but the realpolitik demands tribute from Barack Obama.

It was not only a symbolic act, it was an early sign of how the newly elected U.S. president envisioned his much-promised “change.” His signing of an order to close the Guantanamo prison camp on the first day after his inauguration was eagerly jumped on by the world’s media.

He meant to put an end to the days when suspected terrorists could be arbitrarily incarcerated, denied access to the courts and where the use of torture was considered an acceptable intelligence gathering tool. Surrounded by former generals, Obama proudly and confidently announced that after a swift investigation, the remaining 245 prisoners at Guantanamo would either be released, returned to their homelands or subjected to the normal U.S. civilian justice system.

The intention was twofold: The international community, and particularly the United States, would recognize that human and civil rights, as well as values like the rule of law, would be honored by the oldest and most steadfast Western democracies even in times of heightened security.

Two years after this pompous announcement, reality has caught up with the president, and his limits, along with his weaknesses, have been exposed, as has the opportunism that was camouflaged as his “ability to compromise” for so long. The WikiLeaks revelations concerning the Guantanamo prison system are less spectacular than what was advertised. The fact that many of those incarcerated were either innocent or picked up on the scantiest of evidence was just as well known as the fact that torture was employed in the course of interrogations.



Gitmo’s dark shadow (Op-Ed)
26 April 2011

The latest revelations from WikiLeaks pertaining Guantanamo are anything but surprising. Yet they are potent enough to reiterate the well-known fact of the gross human rights violations that were enacted in the name of the war on terror.

The fact that many of the detainees at the infamous Gitmo were innocent has now 
been reconfirmed.

Of the total detainees, only 220 were deemed to pose a high security risk whereas 380 were profiled as low ranking guerrillas. The icing on the cake is the 150 people who were clearly innocent and picked up from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Worse is the fact that these men were detained for years without any reason recorded for detention. Their crime, being at the wrong place at the wrong time and thus routinely picked up by intelligence agents.

The furore created over the exposure of the humiliations and torture subjected on Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel at the infamous Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib in Iraq may have died down in the mainstream media but its real impact is still being felt by US policymakers. Not only did it incite wide-scale anti-US sentiments it continues to provide extremists a major recruiting and radicalising advantage. Similarly, did Guantanamo. The continued existence of Gitmo that now hosts about 180 detainees deemed too high a security risk to be transferred elsewhere especially to homeland America, is the added 
fuel on the fire.

With the latest Gitmo leaks, the Pentagon is doubly concerned of the ensuing damage on the anti-terrorism efforts. It has also refuted the impression given from assessments it claims are dated and which later reviewed led to different conclusions than previously assessed. Besides, the New York Times report on the Gitmo leaks speaks of faulty assessments carried out at the hands of US analysts that resulted in the release of some high security threat figures for example, the Pakistani pro-Taleban militant, Abdullah Mehsud who post release continued to stage attacks in Pakistan. In short, confusion, faulty intelligence and assessments — often contributed to by wrong leads by some detainees — make the Gitmo diaries an interesting study of things gone wrong. The fact remains that Guantanamo is to date a living reminder of how the US-led war on terror has been mismanaged and even exploited. It is particularly significant now as US-led military efforts in Afghanistan enter a decisive phase against the Al Qaeda affiliated insurgency.

[Mnemosyne]

1. K&R for truth. n/t