Former Guantanamo Bay Detainees Claim Torture by U.S. Military

From one of the British Guantanamo Bay detainees comes accusations of torture by U.S military while he was held at Bagram airbase, Khandahar and Camp X-ray. This has now been echoed by the other British detainees, released after the U.S could find nothing to charge them for, after two years of illegal detention.

From one of the British Guantanamo Bay detainees comes accusations of torture by U.S military while he was held at Bagram airbase, Khandahar and Camp X-ray. This has now been echoed by the other British detainees, released after the U.S could find nothing to charge them for, after two years of illegal detention.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell immediately dismissed the accusation (without any enquiry into the veracity of the claim) saying that “because we are Americans, we don’t abuse people who are in our care” and it was “not in the American tradition to treat people in that manner”. This is just another example of American exceptionalism and lying in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Powells claims fail against documented evidence that the U.S. military has trained (and most likely engaged in) torture techniques at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, engaged in torture and massacre during the Vietnam conflict, supported the Indonesian military during it’s torture of East Timorese, and been responsible for using LSD for interrogation experiments against it’s own scientists. It also somehow places American military as unable to engage in the sort of torture that was used by the French in Algeria, and conveniently ignores the charges bought against U.S. military in Iraq for brutalising prisoners. This doesn’t even begin to address the torture engaged by U.S. police against it’s own citizenry, such as the Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima cases in New York City.

As noted by Julie A. Mertus, the United States does not have a culture of human rights. Some 94% of the U.S. adult population do not know of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While they have some knowledge of their bill of rights within their own country, they have little or no realisation that they have U.S. constitutional obligations to uphold human rights universally.

The denial of Geneva convention rights of the detainees to continuing humanitarian visitations and scrutiny of conditions, equality of conditions to U.S. military personnel, detention only with charges and unfettered access to untainted lawyers are all grounds for human rights violations and the perpetrators of such violations should be charged. Rumsfeld (and others) should stand trial themselves.