A half year after he left as Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld continues to serve as a Defense Department adviser, according to WMR's Pentagon sources. Rumsfeld has been provided with an office in the Rosslyn, Virginia metroplex near the Pentagon from which he continues to influence U.S. military policies in Iraq and elsewhere.
The Bush administration is keeping a tight hold on Donald Rumsfeld's resignation letter nearly five months after the former defense secretary and Iraq war manager stepped down.
The Pentagon says it does not have a copy, and the White House office likely to hold the letter is not subject to the law that allows the public to seek release of government documents, the Freedom of Information Act or FOIA .
A defense official, who declined to be identified publicly, on Tuesday chalked up the close hold on Rumsfeld's letter to the existence of few copies.
"I suspect there's only one copy of that and it went to the president," the official said.
Reuters filed FOIA requests for the letter with the Pentagon and White House.
In response to a November request, the Defense Department's FOIA office said last month a "thorough search of the records systems ... revealed no records responsive to your request."
President George W. Bush's office of administration, in response to another FOIA request, said this month it too had no copy of Rumsfeld's resignation letter.
But Carol Ehrlich, FOIA officer there, said the office of administration within the executive office of the president was a separate entity from the White House office, which controls its own records and is not subject to FOIA.
Pentagon spokesmen refused to release the letter in November 2006, when Rumsfeld resigned after Republicans' stinging election defeat. They told reporters to file FOIA requests for the letter.
Since resigning from his perch atop the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld has all but disappeared. Some say they think he’s going to work for a defense contractor. Others have heard about a book.
Now speculation is centering on 1620 L St. NW. That’s where, on April 30, at least one resident saw him walking into the elevator area, carrying stuff in a postal crate.
ITK spies in the building, which serves as the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management and several law and consulting firms, say others in the building have reported their own Rummy sightings.
Building management isn’t returning phone calls, and Rumsfeld’s not on the building’s roster. The security guard in the lobby not only doesn’t have him on the tenants list. She doesn’t know who Rumsfeld is. So much for staying power.
There's only one thing more disturbing than having Rumsfeld inside the government, on the payroll, and that's Rumsfeld outside of government where you can't keep an eye on him.
Did the Bush administration pass up a chance for meaningful diplomacy with Iran before its radical president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took over? The question has taken on particular urgency in recent days, as the Bush administration has appeared to lay the legal groundwork for war, even while denying it has any intention of attacking Iran. On Jan. 10, in his speech to the nation announcing his “surge” plan for Iraq, Bush declared that “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.” Such a statement is considered a traditional justification for war under international law. And The Washington Post recently reported that the president has given orders allowing U.S. troops in Iraq to capture or kill suspect Iranian operatives. Then, last week, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns, speaking on National Public Radio, invoked Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which has been used by member states in the past to justify unilateral military action. At the same time the president is moving more U.S. naval forces to the Persian Gulf.
In the view of some critics, who include former senior members of the administration, the Bush team may believe that war with a clerical regime they consider to be illegitimate and dangerous is still likely, or even inevitable. But Bush and his senior aides, recognizing they have little public or allied support, seem to be putting in place a policy that incites the Iranians to act first, these critics say. They compare the current Iran policy to past pretexts for war that later proved ill-founded, like the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing large-scale military intervention in Vietnam. The Bush administration intends “to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something they would be forced to retaliate for,” says Hillary Mann, the former director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs on the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice during Bush’s first term. “When they state that the Iranians are building support networks to kill U.S. soldiers—I mean, I went to Harvard Law School, and that’s a casus belli. Nick Burns recently invoked Article 51 of U.N. charter. That’s the right to self-defense. That means you don’t need another U.N. Security Council resolution to go to war.”
Burns, in an interview with NEWSWEEK on Thursday, said his invocation of Article 51 was not directed toward justifying war in any way, but was merely a general statement of any state's right to self-defense. "We are not planning offensive military operations against Iran. We are definitely on a diplomatic path," he said. "I do not believe that military conflict with Iran is inevitable or desirable."
Secretary of State Rice has also vehemently denied that the administration is looking for a way to go to war. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, she repeated that “the president [has] made very clear that we’re not planning or intending an attack on Iran.” She added: “When we have a carrier strike group into the gulf, or provide PAC-3 [the latest version of the Patriot antimissile system], which is a defensive system, it’s simply to demonstrate that the United States remains determined to defend its interests in the gulf and the interests of its allies.” Some defenders of the Bush “realignment” plan toward Iran—in which the administration is seeking to get friendly Sunni Arab states and Israel, along with Europe, Russia and Asia, to form a united front and isolate Tehran—say it has begun to work. They point to fresh signals from the Iranian government that it may be willing to talk. “All across the region, the aggressors are stepping back,” a Western diplomat in Washington told NEWSWEEK.
Still, “not planning or intending an attack” isn’t exactly the same thing as embracing diplomacy with Tehran. In fact, Bush has specifically rejected that idea unless Iran acts first to suspend its uranium-enrichment program. Mann, as well as former senior administration officials such as former secretary of State Colin Powell and his then-top deputy, Richard Armitage, say the president has ignored or played down a number of opportunities to negotiate—especially in the era before Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. As Powell told NEWSWEEK in an interview this week: “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start.’”
Rice was asked again this week about a dramatic opening for such a negotiation that took place in late April and May of 2003, when Iranian officials, using their regular Swiss intermediary, faxed a two-page proposal for comprehensive talks to the State Department. According to the document, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, Tehran plainly laid out the two countries’ “aims” and proposed “steps” to resolve them “in mutual respect.” The document, believed to reflect the views of Iran’s president at the time, the moderate Mohammad Khatami, proposes negotiations on most of the main outstanding issues of interest to Washington—including Iran’s nuclear program, its support for Hizbullah and Hamas and terrorism in general, and stabilizing Iraq. Some officials who saw the proposal at the time, including Hillary Mann and her husband, Flynt Leverett, the former National Security Council (NSC) senior director for Mideast under Rice, have angrily criticized Rice and the administration for not taking it seriously.
Asked about that proposal in House testimony this week, Rice fudged. Democratic Rep. Robert Wexler queried her on it during a hearing Wednesday, though he mistakenly summed up its contents by suggesting that it proposed the “acceptance” of Israel (the document doesn’t say that explicitly, though it does refer to a “two-state approach” to the Palestinian conflict). Rice’s initial reply: “I just don’t remember ever seeing any such thing.” Wexler asked her again, “So you did not see that supposed fax?” Rice said: “I just have to tell you that perhaps somebody saw something of the like, but I can tell you I would have noticed if the Iranians had offered to recognize Israel.” Then she added: “I don’t know what Flynt Leverett’s talking about, quite frankly. Maybe I should ask him when he came to me and said, ‘We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it.’ I have read about this so-called proposal from Iran. We had people who said, ‘The Iranians went to talk to you,’ lots of people who said, ‘The Iranians want to talk to you.’” Asked about her comments later by NEWSWEEK, Leverett shot back: “If I had been in such a position I certainly would have done that. The two people who were in that position then were Elliott Abrams and Zal Khalilzad.” A spokeswoman for Abrams, who is currently the deputy national-security adviser for democracy promotion—but was then in charge of Mideast affairs—told NEWSWEEK on Thursday: “He has absolutely no recollection of getting any sort of fax at all.” (Khalilzad, soon to be the next ambassador to the U.N., was traveling abroad as special envoy to Afghanistan at the time, and is unlikely to have been in Washington when the fax came through.)
Such a proposal did find its way to the State Department in 2003, via Swiss ambassador Tim Guldimann. But a lot of questions remain about its origins and importance. Iranian officials insist that the document began as a U.S. trial balloon, possibly developed out of the office of former deputy secretary of State Armitage. But Armitage, in an interview this week, said he had nothing to do with creating the document and saw it for the first time as an Iranian fax. At the time, Armitage said, he thought it might have represented some creative diplomacy by Guldimann (who would not comment on the proposal to NEWSWEEK). “We couldn’t determine what was the Iranians’ and what was the Swiss ambassador’s,” Armitage said. His impression at the time was that the Iranians “were trying to put too much on the table,” Armitage added.
However, Powell’s former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, said in an e-mail that it was a significant proposal for beginning “meaningful talks” between the U.S. and Iran. Wilkerson added that it “was a non-starter so long as [Dick] Cheney was VP and the principal influence on Bush.” The hardline vice president has long been known as an opponent of diplomatic engagement. Mann and Leverett say it was a historic missed opportunity. “I don’t care if it originally came from Mars,” says Mann. “If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important” as the two-page document that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong’s interest in talks.
Mann says Bush and other senior officials, including Cheney and former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were simply not interested in broad-based talks with Iran. "I think the president does believe the Iranian government is fundamentally illegitimate, and as long as Iran stays that way there will never be the freedom that needs to be brought to the Middle East,” Mann said. “I attended meeting after meeting on Iran for years. This was the tenor of the discussions, that the Iranian government was shaky, a ripe apple on the tree.… And I don’t think war fever has ever abated.”
Others also continue to question the administration’s commitment to real negotiation with Tehran—even if its nuclear concerns are met. “If there is a coherent strategy in place to deal with Iran, I’d like to hear more about it,” Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Rice at another hearing on Thursday. “Maybe the strategy is this: by increasing pressure on Iran across the board, we put Tehran on the defensive and strengthen our hands in any future negotiations. That makes sense—provided we’re serious about talking.”
We may know soon. A senior administration official says that, after four months of silence, the chief Iranian nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, is expected to meet within days in Munich with his European counterpart, Javier Solana, who is representing Germany, France and Great Britain in talks backed by the United States. Says Burns: “We have the sense that there's a turbulent environment inside Iran itself. There's a great deal of opposition to Ahmadinejad's failed policies, and a lot of Iranians seem to understand that they're being isolated." We can only hope that if a conversation starts, both sides listen.
Nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins has been hospitalized in her recurring battle with breast cancer.
"I think she's tough as a metal boot," her brother, Andy Ivins, said Friday after a visit with her at Seton Medical Center in Austin.
Andy Ivins said his sister was admitted to Seton on Thursday. She spent Friday morning with longtime colleagues and friends, and was "sleeping peacefully" when he arrived later in the day.
A self-described leftist agitator, Ivins, 62, completed a round of radiation treatment in August, but the cancer "came back with a vengeance," and has spread through her body, Andy Ivins said.
Ivins' columns, which she infuses with passion and wit, appear in more than 300 newspapers around the country. She's written six books, four of which were best sellers.
They included Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America, which she wrote with longtime friend Lou Dubose; and Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I Have Known.
Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower
Ivins was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. A year later, she described her treatment with characteristic wit: "First they poison you; then they mutilate you; then they burn you. I've had more fun."
She received her third diagnosis a year ago; despite her illness, she's managed to crank out her columns.
In a piece earlier this month, she wrote that she was starting a newspaper crusade to end the war in Iraq.
"Raise hell," she urged readers. "Think of something ridiculous to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. ... We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"
January 11 2007 marks the confluence of two ignominious anniversaries. The first is the five-year anniversary of the opening of the notorious prison camps run by the United States at the Guantánamo Naval Air Station in Cuba. In the five years since the United States started shipping prisoners from around the world to Guantánamo, approximately 99% of the prisoners have never been charged with any transgression, much less a crime.
Approximately 400 of these prisoners, characterised by the Bush administration as "the worst of the worst", have been released without charge, many directly back to their families. That any prisoners have been released is due almost entirely to the outrage of the civilised world. What most of the world does not yet realise is the extent of the misinformation disseminated by the Bush Administration and the US military: for example, American forces captured only 5% of all the prisoners at Guantánamo; 55% of the prisoners were found by the military never to have committed a hostile act against the United States or its coalition allies; the vast majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo were turned over to the Americans in exchange for large bounties paid for by the United States.
The second anniversary marks the start of my clients' - British residents Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna - fifth year of captivity in various prisons around the world. They are prisoners because British intelligence expressly tipped off the CIA that they were travelling from the UK to Gambia and falsely described them as Islamic terrorists. We know this because the British government produced copies of the telegrams from MI5 to CIA in a court proceeding in 2006. Although the names are redacted from the documents, we know that the CIA was the recipient because the judge in the case, when referencing the telegrams, inadvertently noted they were sent to CIA.
In these telegrams, MI5 provided knowingly false information to induce their arrest and his subsequent rendition. A recently issued report from the European Parliament notes "that the telegrams from UK security service to an unspecified foreign government, which were released to the Chairman [of the All Party Parliamentary Group], Andrew Tyrie, suggest that the abduction of Bisher Al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna was facilitated by partly erroneous information supplied by the UK security service MI5." The European Parliament "condemn[ed] the extraordinary rendition of Bisher ... and Jamil ... who were arrested by Gambian authorities in Gambia in November 2002, turned over to US agents, and flown to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo, where they remain detained without trial or any form of judicial assistance." As a result of MI5's involvement, Bisher and Jamil have spent time in the Dark Prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, one of the early "Black Sites" in the CIA's archipelago of secret prisons and interrogation centers around the world; Bagram Air Force Base, also in Afghanistan; and, finally, Guantánamo, where each has languished for four years.
Bisher and Jamil remain prisoners because, up until March of this year, Britain refused to demand the release. In March, the Foreign Secretary made what appears to be a half-hearted request for the release of Bisher in the face of public exposure of his connections with MI5. Britain, however, still refuses to demand the release of Jamil and seven other British residents. Neither will ever be charged; there is no evidence in the record I have reviewed that can withstand even the slightest scrutiny. No court in the remotely civilised world would countenance convictions based on the evidence contained in Bisher's and Jamil's records. Moreover, Bisher's and Jamil's treatment has been so appalling, the Bush Administration would never allow their treatment to be exposed to the world in a systematic fashion in open court. And, of course, some of that story directly implicates British officials.
Bisher and Jamil have withstood various forms of physical torture during their five years as prisoners. Both have suffered numerous beatings (Bisher suffered broken ribs and, perhaps, a broken foot because of beatings by guards - both injuries went untreated despite Bisher's requests for medical assistance), stress positions, temperature extremes, extreme sleep deprivation, death threats, threats to family, and, at various times, starvation and the lack of potable water.
At the start of Bisher's fifth year in prison, it pains me to report that the once healthy and extremely articulate Bisher al-Rawi is failing. He is no longer able to withstand the most insidious form of torture being used by the United States military: prolonged isolation coupled with environmental manipulation that includes constant exposure to temperature extremes and constant sleep deprivation.
Bisher al-Rawi is, slowly but surely, slipping into madness. British officials have long been aware of Bisher's treatment. To my knowledge, they have done nothing to intercede on his behalf. They have done nothing to end his torture and constant mistreatment. They have done nothing to address the constantly changing list of spurious, new allegations that the military is uses to justify continued imprisonment.
Among the latest new allegations: the military alleges that Bisher received terrorist training in Bosnia and Afghanistan. British officials know these charges are false beyond conjecture. Bisher has never been in Bosnia and has signed an affidavit to that effect. The only time Bisher has been in Afghanistan was when the CIA rendered Bisher and Jamil there aboard CIA Gulfstream V-N379P out of the Republic of the Gambia to Cairo, Egypt, where the aircraft refuelled, then went on to the notorious Dark Prison. The reports Bisher and Jamil have given us have matched exactly the flight logs of CIA flights we have obtained. In the Dark Prison, Bisher and Jamil spent weeks underground, encased in total darkness, chained to a wall and shackled in leg irons, starved, and assaulted 24 hours a day with cacophonously loud noise before being transferred to Bagram. The British government's silence in this regard is reminiscent of its previous silence involving the Tipton Three, whom the military claimed were in Afghanistan at a time when British authorities knew they were living and working in England.
The diminution of Bisher's mental faculties has not taken place all at once. Gradually, over time, Bisher simply has worn down. He no longer has the power to withstand the ravages of psychological isolation and the constant abuse he suffers at the hands of the Bush Administration, allegedly in the name of freedom. This is not just my opinion; it is an opinion independently shared by all three of the attorneys who have visited with Bisher since April, most recently the week of December 11 2006. To be sure, Bisher is not the only affected prisoner; attorneys representing other prisoners at Guantánamo report that clients who are being kept in isolation are going insane. But many of those prisoners have spent much less time in solitary than Bisher.
Until March 2006, the British government adamantly refused to intercede on behalf of any of the British residents still interred at Guantánamo. That changed suddenly when the government asked for Bisher's return on non-humanitarian grounds, belatedly conceding that Bisher had worked for MI5. Unfortunately for Bisher, this long-overdue admission and the British government's request for his immediate repatriation coincided with Bisher being thrown into isolation. He remains there more than nine months later, with no end in sight.
Bisher's world is a 6 by 8-foot cell in Camp V, where alleged "non-compliant" prisoners are incarcerated. After years and hundreds of interrogations, Bisher finally refused to be interrogated further. Despite the fact that Guantánamo officials have publicly proclaimed that prisoners are no longer required to participate in interrogations, Bisher is deemed non-compliant and tortured daily.
Solitary confinement is but a single aspect of the torture that Bisher endures on a daily basis. While in isolation, Bisher has been constantly subjected to severe temperature extremes and other sensory torments, many of which are part of a sleep deprivation program that never abates. Frequently, Bisher's cell is unbearably cold because the air conditioning is turned up to the maximum. Sometimes, his captors take his orange jumpsuit and sheet, leaving him only in his shorts. For a week at a time, Bisher constantly shivers and is unable to sleep because of the extreme cold. Once, when Bisher attempted to warm himself by covering himself with his prayer rug, one of the few "comfort items" permitted to him, his guards removed it for "misuse". On other occasions, the heat is allowed to become so unbearable that breathing is difficult and labored. For a week at a time, all Bisher can do is lie completely still, sweat pouring off his body during the day when the Cuban heat can reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the temperature inside Camp V is even higher.
Bisher is allowed no contact with fellow prisoners. Bright lights are kept on 24 hours a day. Bisher is given 15 sheets of toilet paper per day, but because he used his sheets to cover his eyes to help him to sleep, his toilet paper - considered another comfort item by his beneficent constabulary - has been removed for "misuse". Accordingly, he is no longer receives his daily ration of 15 sheets of toilet paper. Imagine being in the position of having to make a choice between using your tiny allotment of toilet paper for the purpose for which it was intended or using it to sleep, and then having it removed altogether.
Dinner never arrives before 9.30pm and sometimes comes as late as 12.00am. It is almost always cold. Changes of clothing take place at midnight when prisoners are given a single, thin cotton sheet for sleeping. Thereafter, a noisy library cart is dragged through the corridors; Bisher has been denied library privileges for some time, but the library cart and the noise are constant reminders that he is afforded no intellectual stimulation. Prisoners are unable to sleep until close to 1.00am. They are awakened at 5.00am, when each is required to return his sheet. All of Bisher's legal documents and family photographs were seized in June and have never been returned.
What the British government knows and the British public needs to know is that Bisher's treatment is designed to achieve a single objective: causing an individual to lose his psychological balance and, ultimately, his mind. Every aspect of Bisher's prison environment is controlled and manipulated to create constant mental instability. Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, has written about the interrogation program at Guantánamo, noting that it has "mov[ed] beyond the CIA's original attack on sensory receptors," McCoy writes:
Guantánamo interrogators stiffened the psychological assault by exploring Arab "cultural sensitivity" to sexuality, gender identity, and fear of dogs. General [Geoffrey] Miller also formed Behavioral Science Consultation teams of military psychologists who probed each detainee for individual phobias, such as fear of the dark or attachment to mother. Through this total three-phase attack on sensory receptors, cultural identity, and individual psyche, Guantánamo perfected the CIA's psychological paradigm.
What is so ineffably sad about all this is that Bisher realises he is losing his mind. He is constantly stressed and tired. He has told us that he knows that he is no longer normal. He reports talking to himself all the time in his cell. He reports that Guantánamo Bay "has taken an extreme toll on my body - even more on my mind." His descriptions are heart-rendingly sad: "Sometimes you are so hurt by what is done to you, by the conditions, that you lose your balance."
Jamil, too, is suffering. His diabetes, which abated during his early imprisonment due to the fact that he was starved and lost more than 100lb, has manifested itself again. Unfortunately, Jamil is not being properly treated, primarily because he refuses to trust the medical staff at Guantánamo. That mistrust is the direct result of the Guantánamo medical staff's active and direct involvement in the interrogation and torture of prisoners. He is experiencing constant pain in his legs and reports that his eyesight is deteriorating. Although the medical staff at the prison has ordered that Jamil be provided with a special diet, the guards who dispense food refuse to provide it, apparently because no one on the medical staff ever thought it important enough to bring the matter to the guards' attention.
Jamil reports that although he continues to meet with his interrogator, he talks little. His interrogator constantly baits him, trying to turn him against his friend Bisher. Jamil says his interrogator claims that Bisher has accused Jamil of being a terrorist and supplying money to terrorist organisations. Jamil dismisses such accusation with a wave of his hand. He knows Bisher would do no such thing. The friendship between my clients is truly touching. Each feels genuine affection for the other, and each has told me he would gladly remain if the other were released. Each says he doesn't want to leave unless his friend is able to leave as well.
As part of a general pattern of mistreatment, mail from prisoners' families is heavily censored, generally for no reason other than as part of the prison's calculated program of cruelty. The military routinely redacts portions of letters where a family member tells a prisoner that he or she loves or misses him. This has happened to Jamil. Jamil is the father of five young children the eldest of whom is 10. Jamil has never seen his youngest daughter who was born after he was arrested in the Gambia. I have see letters from Jamil's youngest children on my visits to Guantánamo, one-page letters that are heavily redacted by military censors. What is the offending language that the military has seen fit to redact? Language like "Daddy, I love you" and "Daddy, I miss you." How do I know? Because on my instructions, Jamil's wife has saved copies of the letters her children sent. The father of another prisoner, David Hicks, reports that similar language was blacked in his letters to his son. It is all part of a deliberate effort to weaken and destroy prisoners psychologically.
The Bush Administration, of course, continues to deny that the United States uses torture, prating endlessly about the Administration's humane treatment of the prisoners and its robust compliance with the Geneva Conventions. It long ago defined away torture in the now infamous "Torture Memo" commissioned by now Attorney General Alberto Gonsales. But thousands of pages of memoranda generated by FBI field agents at the prison camps in Guantánamo and released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act litigation belie the Administration's hollow assertions and paint a grim and accurate picture.
One FBI memorandum stands out because of the litany of horrors it depicts in the space of a single paragraph. Document number 5053, dated August 2 2004, reads as follows:
"As requested, here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO: On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that the interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the floor."
These memoranda expose in detail only some of the "torture techniques" employed by the military. They document abuses that include "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings" (document 4911 entitled Urgent Report). Mamdouh Habib, a former prisoner at Guantánamo who was rendered first to Egypt for unmentionable torture before being transferred to Guantánamo, arrived there without fingernails and bleeding from the ears and nose where cigarettes had repeatedly burned him. Habib, one of the few prisoners actually charged by the military, was summarily released to his home in Australia once the extent of his abuse was exposed. But before placing Habib on the aircraft that would eventually take him home, military officials could not resist one last gratuitous torture: they told him he was being transferred back to Egypt! Among the horrors I have been exposed to in this case, this particular story haunts still.
These FBI memoranda also document efforts by the military to cover-up the abuses. Document number 3977 is a memorandum entitled "Impersonating FBI at GTMO". It informs FBI superiors in Washington, DC that military interrogators at Guantánamo are impersonating the FBI when torturing prisoners. It goes on to state: "These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralisation nature to date and [the Department of Defense, Criminal Investigation Task Force] believes that [the torture] techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [by] the 'FBI' interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public."
If I alone were making these claims, I would expect at least some readers to doubt the reliability of my account. But FBI field agents wrote these documents. The FBI withheld them until a US court ordered their production. Notably, no one in the Bush Administration or the military has questioned the veracity of these FBI accounts. Thus, there is no debate regarding the authenticity or accuracy of the information contained in these documents.
But if corroboration is needed, the FBI accounts are confirmed by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which reports that the methods used at Guantánamo have, over time, become "more refined and repressive" than those witnessed by the Red Cross on previous visits. Red Cross officials are on record stating that military interrogators seek to make detainees dependent upon them through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions". They confirm that prisoners are exposed to loud and incessant noise and music and were subjected to "some beatings".
The Red Cross also reports that interrogators not only used psychological and physical coercion, but also enlisted the participation of medical personnel in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics". Doctors and other medical personnel work directly with military officials at Guantánamo, conveying data about prisoners' "mental health and vulnerabilities". The Red Cross reports these medical professionals become part of the torture and interrogation machine. Their chief function is not the medical care of prisoners, but assisting interrogators in extracting information. As a result, prisoners no longer trust doctors and others to whom their treatment is entrusted.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the Red Cross concluded that "[t]he construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture."
As indicated above, the damage to Bisher's psyche is not unexpected. To the contrary, it is the natural and expected result of prolonged isolation and the elimination of all stimulation and human contact, other than guards and interrogators. The ravages of extended isolation and sensory deprivation leave no marks, but destroy the mind. Consider the fate of Jose Padilla, an American citizen held by the United States military for three years as an "enemy combatant". According to a psychiatrist who examined him over a 22-hour period, "the treatment Padilla received at the hands of the military in a South Carolina brig was such that he now 'lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.'" Stated in more stark terms: Padilla lacks the ability to think clearly enough to talk with or assist his defence lawyers.
I have conveyed my concerns about Bisher and Jamil to the British Embassy in Washington, DC for some time now. Most recently, I provided detailed Declarations, submitted under oath, detailing Bisher's deteriorating mental condition and his appalling treatment. Although I have been assured that great progress has been made negotiating the terms of his release, his release is uncertain and, I'm told, at least four more months away. If Bisher spends four more months in the conditions I have described, the Bisher al-Rawi I met in September 2004, who was healthy, articulate, thoughtful and humorous, in all probability, will no longer exist. He will likely to slip into a madness that is permanent like Jose Padilla. If that state of affairs comes to pass, Britain must recognise and accept the grave culpability it bears.
Almost 100 prisoners that we know of have died in US custody; 33 of these deaths are formally classified as homicides by the military. Not since the second world war, when the US imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent has this country experienced such a constitutional nadir.
If the world is to fight this war on terror, morality must not be allowed to become collateral damage. The time is long past for the British government to demand Bisher's and Jamil's immediate return. Paradigms of innocent suffering, they will remain wraiths that hover above the political and moral landscape, constantly reminding us that the destinies of those who would wage just war and those against whom that war is waged are mingled.
In the process of reasserting the moral high ground in this war, Britain must not forget to reclaim the war's innocent victims. The United States' victims are too innumerable to count. Britain has Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna.
