Patty

Jeffrey St. Clair explains how Obama conducts “freedom and democracy”


March 18, 2014 | Categories: Guest Contributions | Tags: Guantanamo, torture, | Print This Article Print This Article

Status Quo at Gitmo
Where the Torture Never Stops
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
First published, CounterPunch, Vol. 20, No. 10 (September 2013)

It was shortly after five o’clock on a Saturday morning last April. The prisoners in the communal cellblock at Camp 6 in Guantanamo Bay Prison had just gathered for morning prayers. Suddenly the overhead lights went out, the cell doors slammed shut and tear gas canisters exploded in the room.

Military guards charged into the cellblock, firing shotguns loaded with plastic bullets toward the huddled detainees. Three men fell to ground, writhing in pain from being struck by the “non lethal” ammunition. The other prisoners, most of whom had long been cleared for release, were forced onto the floor with guns pointed at their heads and kept prone on their bellies for the next three hours.

According to Guantanamo officials, the action was launched to quash a protest by the detainees, who had placed blankets over the surveillance cameras in their cells. But it seems more likely that the storming of the cellblock was a punitive strike against hunger striking prisoners.

The raid came only hours after members of the International Red Cross had left the prison, following an investigation into the abusive treatment of prisoners then entering the twelfth week of a hunger strike.

One of the detainees roughed up by the guards that morning was a Moroccan political dissident named Younous Chekkouri. Chekkouri has been imprisoned at Guantamo Bay since 2002. Prior to that Chekkouri had spent five months in a dreary jail in Kandahar, where he’d been swept up in the first stages of the Afghanistan war. In all that time, Chekkouri has never been charged with a crime or allowed to argue the case for his own freedom.

Chekkouri’s descent into Kafkaland began in the summer of 2001. He had been living in the suburbs of Kabul, working for a charity devoted to helping children of Moroccan descent. After the attacks of September 11, Chekkouri decided to move with his young wife back to Pakistan, where he had gone to university in Islamabad. His sent his wife out first and Chekkouri followed a few days later, but was snared at the border in the driftnet set out to detain men of Arabic descent. He was roughly interrogated by Pakistani ISI agents, who errantly identified him as a member of a Moroccan terrorist network. He was thrown into a mass prison outside Kandahar and five months later auctioned off to the CIA.

The CIA interrogated Chekkouri for several weeks in a secret prison in Afghanistan. He revealed nothing of value and the spooks soon wrote him off as human by-catch in the war on terror. Even so, the agents believed they might be able to coerce information about other Arabs in the region from him and packed Chekkouri off to Guantanamo, hoping that the terminal austerity of that prison would loosen him up.

More interrogations followed, some more bracing than others. But it was the same story each time. Chekkouri knew about no plots and had never associated with terrorists. After a few months, the inquisitors gave up, resigned to the fact that Chekkouri was a dead end as any kind of informant. The interrogators stopped coming. But Chekkouri’s confined life remained much the same. He was subjected to arbitrary rules, fed dreadful food, awakened before dawn each morning, placed under 24-hour surveillance, denied reading material and contact with the outside world.

Year after year passes. Eventually, a military tribunal secretly cleared Chekkouri for release. Yet he remained locked up with no prospect of gaining his freedom. Indeed, he, like dozens of other detainees, was denied the right to challenge his imprisonment.

In the spring of this year, Chekkouri joined about 100 other detainees in a hunger strike, protesting the grim, hopeless conditions in the prison. At first, the US military tried to cover up the hunger strikes. Then word began to leak out to press, followed by angry denials from Gitmo officials. The Red Cross team was dispatched to Cuba to conduct interviews with prisoners, a visit that prompted the storming of Chekkouri’s cellblock.

Then the government’s tactics changed. They began a brutally force-feeding regime on more than 44 of the hunger-strikers, including Chekkouri. He was placed into an execution-style chair. His legs and arms strapped down. An IV was inserted into his arm. He was kept in the chair for more than 20 hours. Later he returned to his cell. But the force-feeding continues. The guards come at night and chain him to his bed, then insert feeding tubes up his nose and down his throat, draining liquid protein into his stomach. It goes on like this day after day, week after week. A torture without end.

Yet, these men have nothing to confess. They hold no secret knowledge that can be extracted by prolonged suffering. They have committed no crimes deserving of such savage punishment. Their hidden torments serve no deterrent effect. This is torture for the sake of torture, in a quadrant of the world unbound by legal or moral restraints. It is, in a word, sadism.

A few weeks after the raid on Chekkouri’s cellblock, Obama gave a speech at the National Defense University calling for the closure of the Guantamo prison. “Gitmo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” Obama pronounced. “Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at Gitmo.”

But Obama’s fatuous rhetoric is betrayed by his administration’s ruthless legal tactics against the detainees. In court filings in the force-feeding cases made only days after Obama’s speech, the Justice Department argues that indefinite detention of prisoners who have long been cleared for release is actually the goal of the administration. “The public interest,” Obama’s lawyers write, “lies with maintaining the status quo.”

In other words, one criminal act is used to perpetuate another. Thus, does sin pluck on sin."

vernon

they have found many of those released go right back to war.i think it would be wise to just put them to death and save our troops.after all our troops have died by the thousands and i dont feel the killers should ever see the sun again

Patty

Yep if they were innocent when they went in they are going to want revenge when they get out. I would.
This guy has been there 12 years without a trial and absolutely no connection to terrorism. He was going to where he had safely moved he family and was sold to our government as a "terrorist"

vernon

where did you get this information.

Patty

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption and Profiteering from the War on Terror.

http://www.counterpunch.org/

No one there has gotten any kind of a trial. Why are they afraid to trie these guys but prefer to just keep water boarding them till they confess.

Ve'hoe

You really dont know!?!

The UCMJ governs their treatment, not the constituion, just like our military they are subject to harsher penalties.

Obama, despite his rhetoric and juvenile understanding of the UCMJ, constitution, and foreign policies, relented his uneducated opinion and foolhardy campaign promises, once the "grown-ups" and Foreign statesmen actually sat him down and got him to grow up and listen.

I am sure he didnt like it, but nobody gets into GITMO who is innocent... it isnt worth the money it takes to keep them there, if they are getting "Nothing"

Patty

Then why not tri them? You can get anyone to confess to anything. The info they are getting is obviously not accurate if they had Al Qaeda down to 50 terrorists and still couldn't win in 15 years. Keep in mind this is the same man who brags about being a good killer and when it is brought to his attention that 80% are innocent and women and children he laughs and calls them "collateral Damage"
http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11

Ve'hoe

What you said here doesnt make sense,,,,

Try them for what?? If they are not governed under the constituion then they have no reason to follow it, nor is what they do against any law written in the document,,, in other words the constituion is for those who are governed by it, and agree to its tenets.
If you are a terrorist, or armed party against the US, without a declared war, you are not governed by Geneva Conventions either...

Try them for what??? And under what authority?

Patty

There are to many options to list.
http://www.brill.com/enforcing-international-human-rights-domestic-courts

Comment Loc: California

They were captured on the battle field. they are lucky to be alive. I would have killed them all because they tried to escape.

Patty

"Chekkouri’s descent into Kafkaland began in the summer of 2001. He had been living in the suburbs of Kabul, working for a charity devoted to helping children of Moroccan descent. After the attacks of September 11, Chekkouri decided to move with his young wife back to Pakistan, where he had gone to university in Islamabad. His sent his wife out first and Chekkouri followed a few days later, but was snared at the border in the driftnet set out to detain men of Arabic descent. He was roughly interrogated by Pakistani ISI agents, who errantly identified him as a member of a Moroccan terrorist network. He was thrown into a mass prison outside Kandahar and five months later auctioned off to the CIA."
It is right in the article.

"

Apr

2011

U.N. Torture Investigator Says He’s Been Denied Access To WikiLeaks Suspect


Juan Mendez, a United Nations representative on torture said Monday that the United States has denied him unsupervised access to Bradley Manning, the Army private charged with leaking among other things classified diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

Mendez, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said: “I am deeply disappointed and frustrated by the prevarication of the US government with regard to my attempts to visit Mr Manning.”

…

Mendez, who has been investigating complaints about his treatment since before Christmas, said the US department of defence would not allow him to make an “official” visit, only a “private” one. An “official” visit would mean he meets Manning without a guard present. A “private” visit means with a guard and anything the prisoner says could be used in the planned court-martial.

Mendez pointed out that his mandate was to conduct unmonitored visits, and that had been the practice in at least 18 countries over the last six years."

Dave Loc: Upstate New York

There for sure isn't any chance whatsoever that what you are told is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and probably we nasty mean Americans blew up the WTC ourselves just so we'd have an excuse to abuse these poor peace loving goat herders - amazing how dumb living in freedom makes so many people

Patty

I agree why would we close our eyes to this type of government. Washington has such a large number of torture deaths from Abu Ghraib to Gitmo to the secret CIA torture centers to endless drone attacks on kids‘ soccer games, weddings, funerals, medical clinics, schools, farm houses and aid workers. The evidence is completely clear that Washington has tortured a number of individuals to death and into false confessions and blown to pieces thousands of innocents known as “collateral damage.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/president-obama-bragged-good-killing-people-book-article-1.1506211

We have no damn business being there.

vernon

im sorry i dont believe that

vernon

king obama is actually commiting murder ,he murdered a man and his 16 yr old son with out the proper authority.