Some luvvies will believe anything
Brendan O'Neill is not as convinced as the Redgraves are by the tales of torture told by Guantanamo's freed British prisoners
None of us knows for certain what goes on inside the cages of Camp X-Ray and the metal cellblocks of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, where 600 suspected al-Qa'eda and Taleban fighters lifted from Afghanistan have spent the past two years. The five released Britons claim that inmates are beaten, tortured and tormented by their guards. Jamal al-Harith, a 37-year-old father of three from Manchester, told the Daily Mirror he was the victim of 'batons. fists, feet and knees' in an assault that left him with 'severe bruising', carried out by officers who barked, 'Comply, comply, comply.' Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, known as the 'Tipton Three' from the West Midlands, say they were brutally manhandled during interrogations. Their claims have been widely reported as the truth, and as an indictment of America. What is the evidence to support them?
Before the Britons' release on 9 March, 87 inmates of various nationalities were freed from Guantanamo, and none publicly complained of being beaten. Three Afghans released in October 2002 said, 'We were not tortured. We were not unhappy.' Eighteen Afghans freed in March last year complained of 'cramped cells' in which they were 'shackled', but not of being tortured. 'The American soldiers treated me well,' said one. Another said he was hit by an American while in Kandahar, but not in Guantanamo. In April and May last year, 32 released Afghans and three Pakistanis said conditions had become desperate and some inmates had attempted suicide, but. in the words of the New York Times, 'None of those interviewed complained of physical mistreatment.'
Could it be that British citizens at Guantanamo were beaten, while Afghans and Pakistanis were spared the rod? Given America and Britain's special relationship, the fact that many prominent British voices have spoken out against Guantanamo, and the US military's penchant for duffing up towelheads, that would be odd indeed. Perhaps the freed Brits have a different definition of what constitutes a beating from that of their Afghan and Pakistani counterparts. In al-Harith's account, published under the headline 'MY HELL IN CAMP X-RAY' in the Daily Mirror, it is never quite clear whether his beating was a form of punishment or a rough attempt by guards to get him to agree to an injection. The Tipton Three say they were kicked while in Afghanistan before being shipped to Guantanamo, where they were subjected to intense interrogations. Perhaps an Afghan's idea of a rough time in a prisonerof-war camp is a Briton's idea of torture?
Some of the freed Britons' claims about Guantanamo sound like the kind of things we are normally expected to believe of tinpot dictators in the Third World. AlHarith says he heard of amputations of prisoners' limbs that were 'more drastic than necessary'. He claims that American prostitutes were brought in to strip in front of the more religiously devout inmates as a form of psychological torture, and that one such prostitute wiped her menstrual blood on an inmate's face.
The camps at Guantanamo are unquestionably brutal. That al-Harith, the Tipton Three and Tarek Dergoul of east London, as well as 600 others from around the world, have been held in legal limbo, without access to a lawyer and without being told the evidence against them, is a disgrace. Guantanamo, in my view, stands as a testament to the failures of the war in Afghanistan, a country that is deeply divided and war-torn following America's invasion, where Osarna bin Laden and Muhammad Omar slipped the net, while various suspected 'terrorists', including men in their seventies, three children aged 13 to 15 and one Afghan suffering from mental illness, were rounded up and dumped in Cuba. But inmates' arms and legs cut off without good cause? Whores brought in to bleed on detainees? Systematic beatings?
Of course, it is entirely feasible that detainees at Guantanamo are beaten. A week after the Britons' stories were published around the world, two freed Afghans said they were beaten too (though whether they were relaying a true account or following the Britons' example remains unclear). But corroborating evidence for claims of beatings remains very thin — so why have they been widely believed? The Sun's silly campaign to get the former inmates banged up again, after it received a letter from the American embassy claiming that the Britons did have links with the Taleban or alQa'eda, stands out. Almost everywhere else the freed Britons' claims have been treated as the truth. The famous five have been feted as celebrity 'terrorists', the Martyrs of the Month, symbols of British goodness and innocence against Big Bad America.
This uncritical treatment of the Britons' stories highlights a problem with the debate about Guantanamo: it has become not a serious discussion of American foreign policy, much less of the war in Afghanistan, but a platform for moral posturing. That is why it can attract everyone from the anti-war movement to PR guru Max Clifford, from the Daily Mirror to the Redgrave dynasty and others in luwiedom, from those who want to make a buck to those who want to make a point. Guantanamo has become an easy target, and a distraction from what we really need — a thoroughgoing debate about America's wars of intervention as well as of the consequences of such wars.
In many ways, America has only itself to blame for the embarrassments over Guantanamo. The way in which Guantanamo has become an international scandal shows the trouble America gets itself into when it cynically makes human rights the language of international affairs in order to justify its self-serving wars abroad. Over the past 15 years American presidents and their foreign policy advisers have justified military interventions in the name of humanitarianism, as a means of defending individuals against ruthless regimes. Even George 'pre-emptive' Bush has played the humanitarian card. In Afghanistan he made great play of dropping food parcels alongside bombs, so that 'the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America'. In Iraq, Americans promised to follow the Geneva Conventions to the letter; when Iraqis paraded American PoWs in front of TV cameras early in the war, the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared, 'What they are doing is wrong, showing prisoners of war in a humiliating manner „ . People who mistreat prisoners will be treated as war criminals.'
By claiming that it drops bombs in order to uphold human rights, by labelling even the showing of PoWs on TV by its opponents as a 'war crime', America creates a rod for its own back. It has helped to bring in some high, and often unrealistic, standards for the execution of war. When war has to care as well as kill, when its effectiveness is judged by how few people it kills and how many people it 'liberates', then standard wartime activities, such as imprisoning the enemy for long periods of time, can come to be viewed as 'crimes against humanity'. Bush officials may be uncomfortable with complaints about human rights violations at Guantanamo, but they did much to institutionalise a world order where leaders are judged on such matters, and where such accusations have a powerful international purchase.
But one of the main reasons why Guantanamo has become a point of controversy is that it has been latched on to by sections of the anti-war movement and others as an easy way to have a pop at America without having to think too hard about American foreign policy. In January, the actors Corin and Vanessa Redgrave launched the Guantanamo Human Rights Commission in London; British MPs and peers have filed a brief with the US Supreme Court in support of the detainees, as has a coalition of human rights organisations. For many, Guantanamo has come to symbolise everything that is rotten about the Bush administration and American power in general. Indeed, 'Guantanamo' has become a dirty word, simple code for Bad Things; some point to Iraq as 'one big Guantanamo'. Some of the BBC's top broadcasters refer to the Corporation's internal inquiry to discover 'what went wrong' following Andrew Gilligan's 6.07 a.m. broadcast on Today that plunged the government into crisis as the BBC's own Guantanamo'. (Perhaps being asked questions by an internal inquiry is a BBC broadcaster's idea of torture?) Yet those who campaign against Guantanamo rarely mention Afghanistan or the war on terrorism, from where Guantanamo got its inmates. They rarely speak of the violence that remains widespread in Afghanistan, where factional fighting in the west recently left more than 100 dead. They rarely mention that American soldiers stand accused not just of
mistreating prisoners in Afghanistan but of causing the deaths of two Afghans at Bagram airbase, or that the Bush administration still lacks an exit policy for Afghanistan more than two years after invading. Such matters are clearly too messy and complicated for the anti-Guantanamo lobby, which is more comfortable expressing the easy emotion that the Observer journalist David Rose attributed to the Tipton Three after interviewing them: 'burning, righteous anger' against America. Their position appears, not as a political critique of Guantanamo, and certainly not of the war that created it, but as an exercise in empathy with the inmates against brutal, baton-wielding Uncle Sam.
The result is that Guantanamo, no doubt an issue of major importance, has become a distraction from more pressing debates. Supporters of the war in Afghanistan, and of Bush's pre-emptive foreign policy, claim, without a shred of evidence, that the Guantanamo 600 are terrorists ('so evil, so threatening to our very existence', according to the journalist Stephen Pollard) who must remain locked up. Anti-war activists, on the other hand, point to Guantanamo as a symbol of American Evil. Nowhere in this is there a clash over whether the war in Afghanistan was right (no, in my view) or whether the war on terrorism can work (no, in my view). Rather, both sides project illinformed prejudices on to a prison in Cuba about which we still know little for certain. Those who want a more informed debate about America and its role in the world will have to look somewhere other than the narrow discussions about Guantanamo.
Brendan O'Neill is assistant editor of spikedonline.
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