The Great Debate UK
Did Lithuania host a secret CIA prison?
-Clara Gutteridge, Renditions Investigator at legal charity Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-
I welcome the Lithuanian parliament’s announcement that it will investigate allegations that a secret CIA prison operated on its territory from early 2004 to late 2005.
Unlike Poland and Romania – also alleged to have hosted secret CIA torture sites in the years following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan – the Lithuanians have responded in a way that befits a modern European democracy.
“If this is true,” Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said, “Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise that it will never happen again.”
By contrast, such openness has failed to emerge elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly sessions in 2006-2007, which considered Swiss Senator Dick Marty’s report detailing the allegations against Poland and Romania, were perhaps the most depressing political debates I have ever witnessed.
Representatives from all sides of the political spectrum in Poland and Romania united to “refute” the allegations. When the so-called moderates were asked in private why they were so furiously refusing to even countenance these extremely serious allegations, the response was, “you don’t understand – this is an attack against our country, and to consider it would be un-patriotic”.
Evidently, news of the importance of encouraging healthy dissent in a parliamentary democracy has yet to reach some parts of the New Europe, and Lithuania should be applauded for bucking this trend. As a newer recruit to NATO and the EU, Lithuania has far more to be insecure about when it comes to maintaining U.S. relations than relative old-hands Poland and Romania, yet its president has bravely chosen to stand for political accountability rather than trying to suppress the truth.
Bagram lesser known – but more evil – twin of Guantanamo
-Clara Gutteridge is renditions investigator at Reprieve. The opinions expressed are her own.-
The big surprise in Tuesday’s revelations of prisoner abuse at Bagram is how long these stories have taken to reach the international media, given the scale of the problem.
Bagram Airforce Base is Guantanamo Bay’s lesser known – but more evil – twin. Thousands of prisoners have been “through the system” at Bagram, and around 600 are currently held there. Meanwhile President Obama’s lawyers are fighting to hold them incommunicado; stripped of the right to challenge the reasons for their imprisonment.
In this way, Bagram Airforce Base is just the latest in a long line of U.S.-created legal black holes. And as evidence of abuse there has begun to leak out, the U.S. military has responded in exactly the same way as it did to similar allegations at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: by insisting that the torture is just the work of a few low-ranking “bad apples” and repeating that the U.S. “does not torture”.
Sad to say, the truth has revealed itself to be just the opposite. Recently released U.S. government memos have shown the efforts of top U.S. lawyers to justify torture techniques to be used in prisons far from U.S. continental territory. Faced with such evidence, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that prisons like Bagram were created in large part because the U.S. wanted to torture certain people held there.
The Obama administration argues that the prisoners in Bagram are not entitled to challenge their imprisonment because Afghanistan is in a state of war, and that therefore different legal rules apply. But many of the former Bagram prisoners, such as British residents Jamil El-Banna and Bisher Al-Rawi, were captured in countries far from the Afghan “battlefield”, and forcibly transferred into the war-zone. It seems wholly unfair that prisoners be denied rights simply because they have been kidnapped and rendered into a legal black hole.
In such renderings, the U.S. has not acted alone. The British government has recently admitted to capturing two men in Iraq who were handed to the U.S. and subsequently rendered to Afghanistan. Reprieve’s investigations suggest that these men were taken out of Iraq because the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal was breaking, and Afghanistan represented a safer, darker place to hold them indefinitely. Yet the British government refuses to assist us in our efforts to offer the men legal representation, preferring to allow them to languish in Bagram.
Clara, the precedent to Bagram, Abu Graib and Guantanamo is here at home. Police scandals spanning decades show the use of torture to obtain confessions in the U.S.. Water boarding subsequent to WW I and Electric shock after Viet Nam. This is how law enforcement has sometimes operated in the U.S.. These law enforcement officers were war veterans.
We lock up two and a half million people in the U.S.. I shudder to think how many are innocent. I spent years escorting defendants to court. Incompetency and apathy abound with most of the officers of the courts I have seen work. Those who fight for the truth are the rare exception.
Bill Curtis traveled the country investigating this issue. He states “There is a dirty little secret among criminal lawyers. A lot of innocent people go to prison.” The attorneys widely disagree as to how many in their experience how many innocents are convicted. The estimates ranged from 20 to 80 percent by region.
Even 10 percent would be unacceptable if true. Why does it happen? I don’t know. I guess as a people we are just used to accepting what ever our government does.
