When Edward Lucas terms Guantanamo Bay "a legal black hole" in his abysmal The New Cold War ( a kind of anti-Russian version of Melanie Philips' Londonistan ) it appears he is using what Steven Poole terms Unspeak for that which must be elided lest his view that only Russians and Putin ever violate human rights be maintained and not challenged.After all, in the "New Cold War", the USA is, just as it was in the Old Cold War, a Shining Beacon to All Humanity in which inconvenient facts, such as Guantanamo Bay being a place of torture, of the hooding and shacking prisoners, use of 'stress positions' and sleep deprivation and other techniques that were used by the Soviet Union, are routinely omitted.
It is curious that in a "legal black hole", such notions as the Geneva Conventions and the UN Declarations prohibiting torture have all fallen into a murky abyss where nothing was clear as day.
Things just disappear into black holes, even legal ones, a term taken from English contract law but can hardly be said to apply to a place where pictures of hooded and shackled prisoners appeared on numerous photographs such as at Camp X-Ray.
Calling Guantanamo Bay a "legal black hole" is curious given its proximity to the Castro regimes extant Old Communist state
For if this is part of a New Cold War then its hardly morally edifying, not least when in the New Cold War battle fronts of Central Eastern Europe or Rumsfeld's "New Europe", Lucas has nothing to say about the fact that pro-US allies such as Poland consistently lied about CIA "extraordinary rendition" centres being used as part of the "Global War on Terror".
As Steven Poole maintains in Unspeak,
"the location of Guantanamo Bay had been specifically chosen because the US had been able to argue that Cuba had sovereignty there, thus circumventing domestic laws about what it was able to do on its own territory"That's really a great way to fight an New Cold War by copying incarceration of prisoners as "enemy combatants" instead of POW's that is more reminiscent of Fidel Castro's methods of disappearing people into dank black holes of Communist prisons, given the fact that not only was torture used at Guantanamo but also many were merely innocent people swept up by the US military without being given a trial and dubbed "terrorist suspects".
It's clear that torture is against International Law. There is no hole for the law to fall down into.
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ReplyDeleteYou perpetuate some untruths here about Gitmo. The photograph for one, is a photo of a holding area all detainees were kept in at Camp X-Ray, which was only open from January to April 2002. The holding area kept a detainee only for a few minutes while others were escorted through a shower, medical exam, briefing, letter writing, finger printing, DNA swabbing, and other identification methods. Then the detainee was assigned a cell. Very misleading. I wonder what those who do not know think of this photo? Second, they were not classified "POWs" because they were not entitled to that title. They didn't play by the Geneva Conventions (Law of Land Warfare), therefore they were not entitled to its protections. Lastly, understand that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were there from day one, and are still there, being given free reign in a transparent operation. Learn more in my book, "Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.strategicpublishinggroup.com/title/SavingGraceAtGuantanamoBay.html
The photo was just meant to show A picture of Gitmo which has been a place of torture and this is against international laws prohibiting torture.Nothing is more "transparently" blatant as this.
ReplyDeleteGuantanamo Bay is a concentration camp whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection that even POW's are entitled to, denied the right of habeus corpus.
"Stress and distress" techniques are routine. Security duties have been "outsourced" to private contractors not covered by military law or the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush II thus created a lawless environment where torture has been documented by numerous human rights groups such as Amnesty International. These include sensory deprivation, used by the Chinese on US POW's in the Korean War.
Sleep deprivation was used by the NKVD in the Stalinist Soviet Union to produce confessions at the Moscow Show Trials and these decisions come from the top=From the Bush II administration.
The UN Convention Against Torture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits this categorically.
Moreover, using Orwellian language to rebrand all those swept up in Afghanistan as "enemy combantants"-including taxi drivers who had nothing to do with Al Qaida is a sleight of hand.
Us soldiers themselves have admitted, like General Antonio M Taguba, of " numerous incidents od sadistic , blatant and wanton abuses".
The argument that they were sewpt up in the field od cmbat is mendacious, as the ;battlefield; is the Planet Earth in the "Global War on Terror".
Amongst those released from eventually released from Gitmo were a 15 year old unemplyed Afghan farmer, shepherds, cobblers and bakers. Moreover the FBI noted in December 2003 that the "torture techniques" used at Gitmo had "no intelligence of a threat neutralisation nature to date".
Your assertion about the Red Cross' endorsement is not an untruth: it's a plain lie. When military doctors assissted in "coercive procedures" on how to "increase stess levels and exploit fear, it was denounced by the Red Cross as a "flagrant violation of medical ethics"
See Bloche M Gregg MD,JD and Marks Johnathan H MA , BCL, "When Doctors Go to War", New England Journal of Medicine Vol 352,3-6, 6th January 2005 NO 1.
Please define what is meant by the term "Citizen Soldier"