There’s something painfully familiar about US tactics in Guantanamo

IRELAND has agreed to take two of the prisoners from the American concentration camp at Guantanamo, Cuba because they cannot go back to their home country, Uzbekistan. The Americans would like us to think they have jailed only crazed Muslim terrorists in Guantanamo, but people should ask who were held there.

One of those held for the past six years was Mohammed Jawad, who is currently believed to be 19-years-old. He was just 12-years-old when he was arrested in Afghanistan in December 2002 for allegedly throwing a hand grenade at a vehicle occupied by two American soldiers and their Afghan translator.

The Afghans arrested him later and he supposedly confessed under torture. He was then handed over to the Americans at Bagram airfield, the main American military installation in Afghanistan. He reportedly confessed again there and was transferred to Guantanamo.

On December 25, 2003, Jawed tried to kill himself in prison by repeatedly banging his head against a wall. Was this his way of celebrating Christmas in Christian captivity? In 2007, Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a decorated American soldier, was appointed to head the prosecution of Jawed. He thought it would be an easy case.

“I went down there on a mission and my mission was to convict as many of these detainees as possible and put them in prison for as long as I possibly could,” he explained in a BBC interview. “I had zero doubts. I was a true believer.”

But his zeal did not last long. He was appalled to learn of the circumstances under which the supposed confessions had been extracted, and he went through agony himself as he wrestled with his conscience.

“I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything,” he said. “It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution.”

Vandeveld came across a written summary of an interview of Jawad by a special agent of the army criminal investigation division. The material, which was part of the record of an entirely different case at Bagram, outlined extensive abuse that Jawad said had been inflicted on him at the base.

“This abuse included the slapping of Mr Jawad across the face while Mr Jawad’s head was covered with a hood, as well as Mr Jawad’s having been shoved down a stairwell while both hooded and shackled,” Col Vandeveld declared in a sworn affidavit. This statement was supported by an interviewer at Bagram base who testified that Jawad’s “statement was completely consistent with the statements of other prisoners held at Bagram at the time and, more importantly, that dozens of the guards had admitted to abusing the prisoners in exactly the way described by Jawad”.

He also accused the guards at Guantanamo of engaging in further torture by deliberately depriving Jawad of sleep by repeatedly moving him from cell to cell. “We were able to determine that Mr Jawad had been subjected to a sleep deprivation program popularly referred to as the ‘frequent flyer’ program,” Vandeveld noted. Even the official prison records indicated, for instance, that he was moved to a different cell 112 times during a 14-day period.

Vandeveld said he did not have the ability with words “to express the heartsickness” he felt on realising the way that Jawad had been mistreated by American soldiers. He was so upset at the behaviour that he removed himself from the case because he could no longer “in good conscience” participate” in the military process established to try accused terrorists.

If Jawad did throw the hand grenade into the soldiers’ vehicle, it was an act of war. “When I realized Jawad either did not commit the offences charged, or that the charges did not comprise a violation of the law of war, and that Jawad had been terribly mistreated while in US custody,” Vandeveld explained, “I did seek to end his six-year imprisonment through a negotiated plea that would have required him to be afforded rehabilitation and reintegration services while he served a further, brief period in custody.”

His superior ridiculed this proposal, so he resigned from the prosecution team.

Col Vandeveld is now seeking Jawad’s release and cooperating with the American Civil Liberties Union in the matter. There are no grounds for holding this young man any longer, he contends.

The kind of treatment that Jawad had to endure was in some ways similar to what so incensed people on this country in 1971 when the British introduced internment in Northern Ireland. The Irish government protested against this treatment to the European Commission of Human Rights in Strasbourg in December 1971.

The commission reported in January 1976 that the British army’s use of five techniques — hooding, wall-standing, subjection to white noise, deprivation of food and water, and deprivation of sleep — “constituted a practice of inhuman treatment and torture”.

Despite British objections, the Irish government also pressed the case to the European Court of Human Rights. It was the first inter-state case brought before that court. The British did not contest the allegations, but did dispute that they amounted to torture. At the same time, however, they gave an “unqualified undertaking that the ‘five techniques’ will not in any circumstances be reintroduced as an aid to interrogation.”

An overwhelming majority of the court found the use of the five techniques amounted to “inhumane and degrading treatment,” but they stopped short of defining this as “torture” on the grounds that the techniques did not “occasion suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word torture”.

THE court warned the British government, nevertheless, that any subsequent use of such techniques “would involve a deliberate breach of the convention rendering Britain liable to expulsion from the Council of Europe.”

Thirty years later the Americans were using some of same discredited techniques.

The military judge presiding over Jawad’s case found that the Afghans had initially obtained the supposed confession through the use of torture, and that Jawad’s subsequent statements to the Americans could not be separated from his torture only hours earlier. The confession was therefore deemed unreliable and inadmissible.

Although there is no credible evidence against Jawad, the Obama administration is actually trying to use the boy’s confession to oppose his defender’s efforts to secure his freedom. This is the same confession that the military judge deemed inadmissible, without merit, and of no value.

Like Lyndon B Johnson during the Vietnam war, Barack Obama has inherited the mess in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, but he will make these his own mess if he tolerates such tactics.

Remember this is not some dodgy propaganda story from Al Jazeera. This is the story of an American prosecutor backed up by Bob Herbert, who is not just some redneck hack bent on discrediting Obama. He is a distinguished newsman who happens to be an Afro-American who has been writing two columns a week for the prestigious New York Times for more than 15 years.

“Isn’t a period of six years of torture and virtual solitary confinement sufficient punishment for a person who was captured when he was only a child?” Herbert asked on Wednesday.