The whole system that allowed torture must be repudiated, not just Guantanamo.
In his first week in office, President Barack Obama announced the closure of the notorious detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. It was a promise kept and a corner turned – but Guantanamo is only the most visible part of an entire archipelago of extra-legal and often secret prisons, managed by the United States, that extends halfway around the planet. Like the “Gulag Archipelago” of the old Soviet Union, made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, most of its inmates are people who were seized only on suspicion, and many of them were tortured to get “confessions.”
It was widely assumed that shutting down Guantanamo was just the first step in ending the whole shameful system, but the signals sent by the new administration since then have not been reassuring. Last month, actions by government lawyers suggested that it would be business as usual, Bush-style, for the thousands of detainees trapped in other parts of the secret prison system.
Last week came the first sign that Obama remembers that he came to drain the whole swamp, not just to whack a couple of high-profile alligators. The U.S. government is to stop using the term “illegal enemy combatants,” a label contrived by the Bush administration to justify detaining people indefinitely without ever bringing them before a court or even granting them prisoner-of-war status.
The 242 prisoners left at Guantanamo are just the tip of an iceberg. Thousands more are held in legal black holes at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Djibouti, at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and in the countries (notably Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan) to which the Central Intelligence Agency has been outsourcing the more severe forms of torture.
An exact count of the detainees is impossible, because in many cases even their names are not known, but estimates run as high as 18,000 people, held for as long as seven years. Some of them were involved in acts of violence against Americans, others at least gave the matter some thought, and some are completely innocent – just as at Guantanamo. All were classed as “illegal enemy combatants,” which meant that they had no legal recourse against their imprisonment.
Since his first bold gesture about Guantanamo, Obama has seemed to be drifting toward the view of the Washington security establishment, which would rather lock up innocent people than risk letting a dangerous person go free. When U.S. District Judge John Bates of the District of Columbia, hearing the case of four men held at Bagram, asked the new administration if it intended to change the Bush-era policy of keeping the detainees out of reach of courts, the answer was no.
In a case involving a lawsuit by several former detainees against a subsidiary of Boeing that supplied aircraft for the “rendition” flights, the Obama administration repeated the Bush demand that the case be dismissed because court testimony could damage national security and relations with other nations. (Translation: We did send them for torture, but revealing that would embarrass the people who did the torturing for us.)
It was looking pretty grim for a while, as if Obama’s decision to shut down Guantanamo and halt U.S.-sponsored torture was mere window-dressing for a policy that had not really changed at all. Even now there’s no guarantee that he will change the policy fundamentally; after all, he has fallen into the clutches of the Washington consensus in his Afghanistan policy. But dropping the category of “illegal enemy combatants” is a hopeful sign.
The Justice Department said that suspects will in future be held according to standards set by the international laws of war. That only means that there will be no more torture and no more renditions and that the United States must provide information about all the people it holds. It does not mean it will release them until after the “war” is over, even though the “war on terror,” like the “war on crime” or the “war on drugs,” could last for decades.
Nor does promising to treat the detainees according to the Geneva Conventions oblige the Obama administration to give them access to the U.S. court system. That will require a separate decision, and Obama will not make it until he thinks the country is ready (if he makes it at all). But this is a start.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
