Guantánamo has proved a useful distraction from the secret detention camps run by the US around the world
by George Monbiot
We shouldn’t be surprised to hear that George Bush dined with a group of historians on Sunday night. The president has spent much of his second term pleading with history. But however hard he lobbies the gatekeepers of memory, he will surely be judged the worst president the United States has ever had.
Even if historians were somehow to forget the illegal war, the mangling of international law, the trashing of the environment and social welfare, the banking crisis, and the transfer of wealth from rich to poor, one image is stamped indelibly on this presidency: the trussed automatons in orange jumpsuits. It portrays a superpower prepared to dehumanise its prisoners, to wrap, blind and deafen them, to reduce them to mannequins, in a place as stark and industrial as a chicken-packing plant. Worse, the government was proud of what it had done. It was parading its impunity. It wanted us to know that nothing would stand in its way: its power was both sovereign and unaccountable.
Three days before Bush arrived in Britain, the US supreme court ruled that the inmates at Guantánamo Bay were entitled to contest their detention in the civilian courts. This is the third time the supreme court has ruled against the prison camp, but on this occasion Bush cannot change the law: the court has ruled that the prisoners’ rights are constitutional.
Symbolically the decision could scarcely be more important. Practically it could scarcely be less. The department of defence can transfer its prisoners to an oubliette in another country, where the constitution’s writ does not run. The public atrocity of Guantánamo Bay has provided a useful distraction from something even worse: the sprawling system of secret detention camps the US runs around the world.
We don’t, of course, know much about this programme. Bush first acknowledged it in September 2006. “Of the thousands of terrorists captured across the world, only about 770 have ever been sent to Guantánamo.” Other suspects, he said, were being “held secretly” by the CIA. “Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged.” He went on to claim that all the secret prisoners had now been transferred to Guantánamo Bay.
Several lines of evidence suggest that this claim was false. The CIA appears to have overseen or controlled, and in some cases appears still to be running, black sites in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Macedonia, Kosovo, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand and, possibly, Diego Garcia. The US appears to be using ships as secret prisons. In just two years the CIA ran 283 flights - which the Council of Europe believes were used for transporting secret prisoners - out of Germany alone. It admits that it possesses 7,000 documents about its ghost detention programme. Are we to believe all this was done for the 14 men transferred to Guantánamo Bay? In Iraq, the US now admits to holding 22,000 prisoners without charge in its own facilities, some of whom are known to be kept away from the Red Cross and other visitors.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/17/9690/
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