Guantanamo Concentration Camp turns 10

Well. Okay. I was reluctant to use that term, "concentration camp," only because that might invoke some holocaust imagery that Guantanamo doesn't entirely fit. It is a concentration camp though. It is a camp where people are concentrated. And it definitely is not a "prison" camp. The actual definition of a prison is "a building (or vessel) to which people are legally committed as a punishment for crimes they have committed." Guantanamo is not legal, and no one there has been convicted of any crimes. Of the 171 prisoners currently being held there, 89 have been cleared for release. And they won't be released, at least until after the 2012 election. Can't be seen as the president who released a bunch of terrorists, you understand.

We committed torture there. Japanese war criminals were hanged for doing what we did to Guantanamo prisoners. In 2009, Barack Obama granted full immunity to all the war criminals involved in waterboarding, from the policy-makers, to the guards who directly participated in and committed torture. Everyone.

Here's Christopher Hitchens getting waterboarded. Hitchens was a sharp guy, but on America's war on terror, he could be a real dumbshit. He argued that waterboarding was not torture, until his boss at Vanity Fair challenged him to undergo it himself. Hitch may have been a moron in some regards, but he was a man of integrity. This is what waterboarding looks like.



Now imagine if your captors didn't kindly stop when you asked them to. Imagine if you were waterboarded 183 times. Imagine that once your torture session was complete, you were forced back into your cell where the lights were always on, and you were subjected to another form of torture known as sleep deprivation. Imagine if you were then beaten, electrically shocked, forced to be naked, or raped. It's okay. It's for freedom.

Full. Immunity. Not only has Barack Obama let war criminals go free, all but guaranteeing that these tactics will be used in the future, but he has abolished the fifth amendment. You no longer have a right to a trial. You can be rounded up and put into a concentration camp. And guess what? No one gets in trouble for committing torture. Thanks to Barack Obama, you can be legally put into a concentration camp and tortured.

The CIA is made up of a bunch of right wing fascists, and they still have black sites up all over the world. You can bet your buckle there's shit going on there. An American detainment facility in Afghanistan was just accused of torturing prisoners. Psychological torture is still taught in army manuals, which Bradley Manning was subjected to. So torture is still going on under Obama.

I don't see how any person who claims to have respect for this country, even anyone who claims to have conventional morality, can vote for the Republicans or Democrats after the last eleven years. There is supposed to be a point, somewhere, where the "lesser of two evils" is so bad that you just can't fucking take it anymore. The Democratic party is now further to the right than George W. Bush. Both American political parties commit torture. Both political parties are players in perpetual war. Both have taken steps to destroy the Bill of Rights. Say you vote third party, and those mean ol' Rethuglicans win because of it. How will anything at all be different? Anything? It's going to be Romney no matter what, let's not kid ourselves. Romney is seen as a "moderate" Republican. Well. Barack Obama is a moderate Republican. This isn't fucking rocket science.

But don't take my word for the horrors that go on in this camp. Here's an article written by Lakhdar Boumediene, an innocent man who was imprisoned there from 2002 to 2009.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

Or how about Murat Kurnaz, another innocent man who was held there for five years?

I was taken to Kandahar, in Afghanistan, where American interrogators asked me the same questions for several weeks: Where is Osama bin Laden? Was I with Al Qaeda? No, I told them, I was not with Al Qaeda. No, I had no idea where bin Laden was. I begged the interrogators to please call Germany and find out who I was. During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

After about two months in Kandahar, I was transferred to Guantánamo. There were more beatings, endless solitary confinement, freezing temperatures and extreme heat, days of forced sleeplessness. The interrogations continued always with the same questions. I told my story over and over — my name, my family, why I was in Pakistan. Nothing I said satisfied them. I realized my interrogators were not interested in the truth.

Despite all this, I looked for ways to feel human. I have always loved animals. I started hiding a piece of bread from my meals and feeding the iguanas that came to the fence. When officials discovered this, I was punished with 30 days in isolation and darkness.

You should read this piece by Andrew Cohen. He cites part of an interrogation which took place at Guantanamo, that is strikingly similar to the interrogation scene in 1984.

Recorder: [Item 3.a.4.] While living in Bosnia, the Detainee associated with a known Al Qaida operative.

Detainee: Give me his name.

Tribunal President: I do not know.

Detainee: How can I respond to this?

Tribunal President: Did you know of anybody that was a member of Al Qaida?

Detainee: No, no.

Tribunal President: I'm sorry, what was your response?

Detainee: No.

Tribunal President: No?

Detainee: No. This is something the interrogators told me a long while ago. I asked the interrogators to telI me who this person was. Then I could tell you if I might have known this person, but not if the person is a terrorist. Maybe I knew this person as a friend. Maybe it was a person that worked with me. Maybe it was a person that was on my team. But I do not know if this person is Bosnian, Indian or whatever. If you tell me the name, then I can respond and defend myself against this accusation.

Tribunal President: We are asking you the questions and we need you to respond to what is on the unclassified summary. If you say you did not know or you did know anyone that was a part of Al Qaida, that is the information we need to know.

Detainee: I have only heard of Al Qaida after the attacks in the United States. Before that, I had never heard of Al Qaida. Even after I heard of Al Qaida, I felt that Al Qaida was the Taliban and the Taliban was AI Qaida. Then after watching the news, I knew Al Qaida was associated with Bin Laden and the Taliban was associated with the Afghans.

From the same article:

Mr. Ait Idir's resistance during the episode of religious-physical abuse described above led to a further, unprovoked attack, which ultimately resulted in partial facial paralysis and a life-long disability. One day shortly after the pants related beating, guards told him they wanted to search his cell. There had been no intervening disciplinary issues. He sat on the floor as instructed. Despite his full cooperation, he was sprayed in the face with chemical irritant, and put into restraints. Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet -- submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat. Then a soldier jumped on the left side of his head with full weight, forcing stones to cut into Mr. Ait Idir's face near his eye. The guards twisted his middle finger and thumb on his right hand back almost to the point of breaking them. The knuckles were dislocated. As a result of this incident, the left side of Mr. Ait Idir's face became paralyzed for several months. The symptoms from that attack continue to plague him two years later.

On yesterday's Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Omar Deghayes, an innocent man who was held in Guantanamo for five years. She also talks to a Guantanamo prosecutor who was fired after speaking out. Deghayes was tortured in Pakistan before being transferred to Guantanamo, where guards gouged his eyes and left one eye permanently blind. He comes on at about 21:40.

People are locked up in isolation camps... People lost their hands, lost their eyes, lost their limbs... Some people were subjected to sleep deprivation. They weren’t allowed to sleep... And they had to live under those conditions for six years ... without being convicted of any crime, which is the most unacceptable thing."