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A horrible interrogation camp like those used by the Nazis

Guantanamo, according to a US experts

By jean-Guy Allard
Taken from Granma International
02.10.05

THE United States is running an interrogation camp in Guantanamo like those established by the Nazis did during World War II, which the1949 Geneva Convention permanently prohibited after the war ended, according to Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in the United States.

In his book, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, Ratner compares the detention and interrogation installations that the Bush administration is using on the illegal US military base in Guantanamo, to the special concentration camps conceived by Hitler’s German Armed Forces specifically for interrogating enemy combatants.

“They ran detention centers that were called interrogation camps, not prisoner of war camps,” explained Ratner. “The 1949 Geneva Conventions outlawed interrogation camps and required that such prisoners be treated as POWs. What we have in Guantánamo today is an illegal interrogation camp.”

The US administration refuses to call the Guantanamo prisoners “prisoners of war,” and refers to them as “enemy combatants.”

“There is no legal justification for what the United States is doing, no matter what you call the prisoners. The U.S. inquisitors are not just asking for name, rank, and serial number (as is required by the Convention): they are interrogating people morning, noon, and night. Whether you call it torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; or stress and duress, it is a violation of international law,” affirms Ratner.

The CCR President describes how a lot of the people picked up by warlords of the Northern Alliance were kept in metal shipping containers, so tightly packed that they had to ball themselves up, and the heat was unbearable. The people inside were suffocating, so the Northern Alliance soldiers shot holes into the containers, killing some of the prisoners inside.

“Only a small number, 30 to 50 people in a container filled with 300 to 400 people survived” related Ratner.

He notes that 134 of the 147 prisoners later released from Guantánamo “were guilty of absolutely nothing.” Only 13 were sent to jail on their return to their country of origin. One prisoner released after a year claimed he was somewhere between 90 and 100 years old, according to Ratner. Old, frail and incontinent, he wept constantly, shackled to a walker.

“Guantánamo’s purpose is to break down the human personalities of the detainees in order to coerce from them whatever their captors want, to get them to confess to anything, to implicate anyone. Guantánamo is a prison where cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment – even torture – is practiced, and it is utterly illegal.”

However, the US authorities have admitted to using techniques that legally constitute cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, emphasized Ratner.

“Interrogation is why the U.S. administration is depriving all these people of any legal or human rights, why it shaves their heads and keeps them in cages, why they have no access to their families, why in many cases their families may not even know if they are dead or alive” writes Ratner.

“The Convention is crystal clear”

Under the United Nations Convention against Torture, an international treaty that the United States has also ratified, torture is an international crime.

That Convention “also establishes what is called universal jurisdiction for cases of torture,” Ratner explains.

“So, for example, if an American citizen engaged in torture anywhere in the world and was later found in France, let’s say, that person could be arrested in France and either tried for torture there or extradited to the place of the torture for trial. To the extent U.S. officials were or are involved in torture in Guantanamo or elsewhere, they should be careful about the countries in which they travel.”

Ratner also specified that torture committed by U.S. soldiers or private contractors acting under U.S. authority is a violation of federal law, punishable by the death penalty if the death of a prisoner results from the torture.

“Even if one argues that al Qaeda suspects are not governed by the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and other human rights treaties ratified by the United States prohibit torture as well as other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.” insists the expert.

“The convention is crystal clear: under no circumstances can you torture people, whatever you call them, whether illegal combatants, enemy combatants, murderers, killers. You cannot torture anybody ever; it’s an absolute prohibition.”

According to Ratner, “Guantanamo has become a symbol of much that is wrong with our society.”
It is a “complex of brutal prisons where hundreds of men and boys from all over the world, many of whom we believe are neither guilty of any crime nor pose any danger to the security of the United States, are being held by the U.S. government under incredibly inhuman conditions and incessant interrogation.”

Even worse, indicated Ratner, they have “no idea when, if ever, they will see an end to their plight. These prisons are a symbol of the disdain with which the Bush administration has brushed aside longstanding precepts of international law and civilized conduct. It is indeed a national disgrace.”

Tortured by chains, electric shocks and sodomy 11 detainees in the Guantanamo Base reported that US soldiers in Afghanistan and Pakistan tortured them before sending them to the base. Their accounts included torture using chains, electric shocks and sodomy, according to notes taken by the US attorney Tom Wilner, which were divulged after remaining previously secret, according to an AP report.

Some of the men said that they confessed to having belonged to the Taliban’s religious militia or the Al-Qaeda network just to end their torture, noted the lawyer for 11 of the Kuwaitis detained in Guantanamo.

 

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