from The Great Debate UK:
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.
Should torture be part of the U.S.’s counterterrorism approach?
The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.
Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.
Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA-Ret.) is president emeritus at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The views expressed are their own.
President Obama decided not to release a new group of detainee abuse photographs because he believes they would inflame our enemies and threaten American troops. Indeed, the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib have served as a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and have sparked outrage across the world.
It is not the release of the photos, however, that would elicit horror and anger. It is their brutal content and the misguided policies they reflect. The controversy surrounding the photos and the president’s release of four Department of Justice memos have brought into sharp focus a debate that has been in the shadows of public discourse for several years: Should the U.S. include torture and cruelty in its counterterrorism arsenal?
Food for thought here, perhaps we should reevaluate our treatment of U.S. civilians held in state prisons. We should also examine procedures for admitting evidence. Quite often following court rules interferes with the quest for presenting evidence that can exculpate a charged suspect. I suspect state prosecutors behave no better than the Federal Prosecutors.
We still have way to much violent crime and way to many people locked up. Lawsuits abound where police conspire to frame innocent people. I would submit they are only the few that were caught. There may be several hundred thousand Americans in prison for crimes they did not commit. What ever happened to “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man lose his liberty”.
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.