By Minnie Bruce Pratt
On Aug. 1 Pentagon tribunals began for over 600 prisoners seized by the U.S. at the beginning of its war on Afghanistan in 2001, and held since then without charge at its military base in Guan tanamo, Cuba. The detainees have not been allowed to speak to a lawyer or contact their families. They have had no access to documents about their cases.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld designated them "enemy combatants," a new category that allows the U.S. to defy the Geneva Conventions for treatment of prisoners of war.
The Combatant Status Review Tri bunal is a hearing during which a panel of military officers decides if a prisoner is an "enemy combatant." The U.S. State Department, in a July 30 press release, declares this to be a "fact-based administrative proceeding," and states that the panel is composed of "three neutral officers." The hearings are closed to the press and the public.
Defense lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, who have never met their clients, declare the tribunals to be a mockery of justice, as well as an attempt to evade a June ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court granting legal rights to detainees. Up until the Supreme Court ruling, the prisoners could have been tried and put to death without charges, jury, or right of appeal.
Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the CCR, said: "The government is making every effort...to comply as minimally as possible..." (Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 1)
A Dec. 26, 2002, Washington Post story detailed brutal interrogation of the prisoners at Guantanamo under the supervision of the CIA. According to the Post, detainees "are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles."
Torture in Guantanamo--
and Iraq
Other torture techniques included sleep deprivation and beatings while the detainees were blindfolded and bound.
If the dreadful details sound familiar and bring back the images of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, that's because there is a clear link between these terrors. In early September 2003 a team from the prison in Guantanamo went to Abu Ghraib prison to instruct the U.S. military there on interrogation "procedures."
But the Pentagon, once again, is putting out the "bad apple" theory in order to deny its systematic use of torture. A report issued on July 22 by the Army inspector general, Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, attributes horrific abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan to "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders." (New York Times, July 23)
In fact, the U.S. brass set up its School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Ga., to train generations of torturers. Death squads and paramilitaries from that training have wreaked death and destruction against peasant and Indigenous organizers, trade unionists, and political activists for decades in Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru--all across Central and Latin America.
Now the Pentagon is exporting torture again--as a weapon in the current U.S. imperialist war.
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