How to Build a Human Bomb

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    How to Build a Human Bomb Guantanamo Bay is killing people thousands of miles away.
    by George Monbiot

    Published in the Guardian (May 13 2008 )

    When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in
    Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of
    its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at
    Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows
    both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to
    release the camp's prisoners {1}. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it
    was to put them there in the first place.

    Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least thirty former
    Guantanamo detainees who have "taken part in anti-coalition militant
    activities after leaving US detention" {2}. Given that the majority of the
    inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were
    detained, that's one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality it turns out that
    "anti-coalition militant activities" include talking to the media about
    their captivity in Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in
    its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with
    Michael Winterbottom's film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven
    former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taliban or
    Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release.
    One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects
    well on the US government.

    The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men "successfully lied to
    US officials, sometimes for over three years". {3} The US government's
    intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who
    would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters
    were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal
    interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of
    innocence, without charges, representation, trials or due process of any
    kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is
    guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo Bay not only deny justice to the inmates,
    they also deny justice to the world.

    Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to
    deserting the Kuwaiti army to join the jihad in Afghanistan {4}. He admitted
    that he fought with Taliban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later
    retracted this confession, which had been made "under pressure and threats"
    {5}. When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over
    to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissable evidence
    required to convict him. Among his defences was that neither he nor his
    interrogators had signed his supposed testimony {6}. The Kuwaiti courts,
    without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.

    All evidence obtained in Guantanamo Bay, and in the CIA's other detention
    centres and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is
    extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for
    producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop.
    Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a
    wide range of coercive techniques - devised or approved at the highest
    levels in Washington - have been used to make inmates tell the questioners
    what they want to hear.

    In his book Torture Team (2008), Philippe Sands describes the treatment of
    Mohammed al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo Bay and described by the authorities
    (like half a dozen other suspects) as "the twentieth hijacker". By the time
    his interrogators started using "enhanced techniques" to extract information
    from him, al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell
    permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he "was talking
    to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a
    corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end" {7}. He was
    sexually abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further
    54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted
    from a man in this state?

    The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict
    after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but
    were radicalised by their detention. In the video he made before blowing
    himself up, al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in
    Guantanamo Bay. "Twelve thousand kilometers away from Mecca, I realized the
    reality of the Americans and what those infidels want", he said {8}. He
    claimed he was beaten, drugged and "used for experiments" and that "the
    Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the
    Koran and threw it in dirty places" {9}. Al-Ajmi's lawyer revealed that his
    arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from
    praying {10}.

    The accounts of people released from Guantanamo Bay describe treatment that
    would radicalise almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published
    a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him
    on his arrival with these words. "Do you know what the Germans did to the
    Jews? That's exactly what we're going to do with you." There were certain
    similarities. "I knew a man from Morocco", Kurnaz writes, "who used to be a
    ship captain. He couldn't move one of his little fingers because of
    frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would
    amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came
    back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs."
    The young man - scarcely more than a boy - in the cage next to Kurnaz's had
    just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a
    coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered
    in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he
    tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard
    would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner,
    he was routinely beaten by the camp's Immediate Reaction Force, and taken
    away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more {11}.

    Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers.
    The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of
    sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense
    Intelligence Agency says, "maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a
    farmer who got swept along and did very little. He's going to come out a
    fully fledged jihadist." {12}

    In reading the histories of Guantanamo Bay, and of the kidnappings,
    extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United
    Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is
    that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and
    prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates
    evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a
    process which generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty
    from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives,
    this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the
    ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the
    world more dangerous.

    www.monbiot.com

    References:

    1. Josh White, 8th May 2008. Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide
    Attack. Washington Post.

    2. Department of Defense, 12th July 2007. Former Guantanamo detainees who
    have returned to the fight.
    http://www.defenselink.mil/news/d20070712formergtmo.pdf

    3. ibid

    4. Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants
    at US Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Department of Defense, No date
    given. Abdallah Salih Ali Al Ajmi: summary of evidence. Pages 8-9 of the pdf
    file. http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt_arb/000201-000299.pdf#38

    5. Department of Defense, no date given. Summarized Administrative Review
    Board Detainee Statement. Page 47 of the pdf.
    http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/detainees/csrt/ARB_Transcript_Set_17_22822-23051.pdf#466.

    6. No author given, 26th May 2006. Five ex-Guantanamo detainees freed in
    Kuwait. Associated Press.

    7. Philippe Sands, 2008. Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of
    American Values, extracted in Vanity Fair, May 2008.

    8. Quoted by Alissa J Rubin, 9th May 2008. Bomber's Final Messages Exhort
    Fighters Against US. New York Times.

    9. ibid

    10. Ben Fox, 7th May 2008. Ex-Gitmo prisoner in recent attack. Associated
    Press.

    11. Murat Kurnaz, 2008. Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in
    Guantanamo. Palgrave Macmillan. Extracted in the Guardian, 23rd April 2008.

    12. Quoted by David Rose, 26th February 2006. Using terror to fight terror.
    The Observer. Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/13/how-to-build-a-human-bomb/

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