From The Times
January 1, 2009
Guantánamo: a hellhole where torture scandals shook the world’s trust in US justice
At first it seemed ideal to hold terrorists but it turned into a disaster for the US
Tim Reid

On January 11, 2002, a giant C141 military transport aircraft landed at the US military base in Guantánamo Bay after an 8,000-mile journey from Kandahar, in Afghanistan – a trip during which the 20 hooded, shackled prisoners inside had not been allowed to use the lavatory.

As the transporter came to a stop and its cargo door opened, it was surrounded by dozens of US Marines in face masks and bullet-proof vests, together with soldiers in Humvees aiming grenade-launchers and machineguns.

Slowly, the first “enemy combatants” in the Bush Administration’s newly declared War on Terror emerged. The men – in orange jump-suits and blue facemasks and with their feet and hands manacled – shuffled on to the tarmac and into Camp X-Ray, part of a detention camp that would quickly become a worldwide symbol of US injustice and abuse.

The September 11 attacks were still a vivid memory and the Taleban had only recently been toppled in Afghanistan. The American naval base in this corner of Cuba, which had previously been used to house Cuban and Haitian refugees intercepted at sea, seemed the ideal place to hold terrorists hell bent destroying America.

The world was assured that the men being sent there were “the worst of the worst”. The Bush Administration argued that because the prisoners were on Cuban soil they were not subject to US law; and because they belonged to no national army they were not entitled to the protection of the Geneva Conventions. They were declared illegal “enemy combatants” and held indefinitely without charge inside a camp sealed off from the rest of the world.

Today, as the Bush Administration and the incoming Obama team join forces to try to persuade Britain and its European allies to help to close Guantánamo, it seems fair to conclude that the facility has been a disaster for President Bush and America. The very mention of its name has become shorthand for all the extrajudicial excesses, mistakes and torture scandals that have so sullied America’s once cherished reputation as a beacon of freedom and justice.

Opening the facility seemed a justified move to many Americans in the early days of the War on Terror. But the Bush Administration was creating a monster that has eroded America’s moral authority, and a prison full of foreigners – many of whom have been cleared for release but have nowhere to go.

Those first arrivals were quickly followed by hundreds of others who arrived at the newly built Camp Delta, a 612-unit detention centre completed in April 2002.

Since it opened, 779 detainees have been held at Guantánamo. Today it holds 248. The rest have been released, nearly all without charge. Only about 20 have been charged. More than 50 more have been cleared for release, but face persecution in their home countries and are still incarcerated. A few are still being interrogated. The US Government estimates that no more than three dozen inmates are dangerous threats to security.

There are, however, dangerous men inside Guantánamo. In September 2006, 14 “high-value” detainees, who are believed to have been held at secret CIA “ghost prisons” in other countries, were transferred there. They included Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks. On arrival they were granted protection under the 1949 Geneva Convention.

Since then Mohammed has made several appearances at the military tribunals set up at Guantánamo to try inmates, a system that the US Supreme Court declared unconstitutional. If Barack Obama is to close the prison, his thorniest problem will be coming up with a judicial process to try Mohammed and other alleged senior members of al-Qaeda on the US mainland.

Accounts from released inmates, leaked memos and reports by human rights groups have created a disturbing picture of how detainees have been treated. The Bush Administration has always fiercely denied torturing prisoners. However, in 2002 internal documents surfaced from the US Justice Department showing that the definition of torture had been redefined to include only conduct that produced “death or major organ failure”. One British doctor said this was “not a definition anyone on the planet is using”.

Prisoners were shackled, beaten and left in the their own faeces for up to 18 hours. They were force-fed without sedation, with tubes shoved down their throats, sexually humiliated by female guards, hooded for hours, chained in front of strobe lights and subjected for hours to music blaring from loudspeakers. By 2008 there had been at least four suicides and hundreds of suicide attempts, although no official figures cover this.

Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, said in June 2005: “They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”

However, worldwide opinion turned against Guantánamo. Leaders across Europe, including Tony Blair, said that it should be closed. Amnesty International called it the “gulag of our times”. In June 2006 the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to support a motion urging the US to close it. By the end of 2006 even Mr Bush conceded that he wanted it shut.

In June last year, after the Bush Administration had suffered a string of judicial setbacks over Guantánamo, the US Supreme Court had the final say: inmates were entitled to protection under the US Constitution – and the right to be heard in civilian courtrooms.

A year earlier Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State, had said: “Essentially, we have shaken the belief the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantánamo open . . . it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.”

Who’s on the list

— There are “approximately 60” inmates cleared for immediate release, the US military says. It is this group that European countries are being asked to take in first

— They include 17 Chinese Uighurs, ten Yemenis, eight Tunisians, four Algerians, four Uzbeks, three Iraqis, two Saudis and one detainee each from Libya, Egypt and Palestine, according to a report last month by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank

— These prisoners were at the “less dangerous end of the spectrum”, the study said. Yet it also said that of the 60, two are alleged al-Qaeda leaders, 12 alleged al-Qaeda operatives, and 38 were classed by the US military as “foreign fighters”

— It is the sheer length of their detention in Guantánamo, and the uncertainty about their backgrounds, that has given many European governments pause when confronted with the prospect of these men walking free in their own cities

— Many Guantánamo inmates are suffering mental illnesses, and other disorders. Many were in their late teens or young men when they were jailed and have never set foot in the West. It is unclear how they would react to beginning new lives in Europe

— The Bush Administration has already sent a list of detainees to European allies whom it wants to be released in Europe, including four Uzbeks, an Egyptian, a Palestinian and a Somali

Ellie