Mother Davis twirls her skeleton keys around as she muses,
Developments in the release of four prisoners from the American gulag at Guantanamo Bay are nagging at my mind, and so I want to provide an update to the article I wrote on the prisoner release a few days ago.
The four men, Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar, and Moazzam Begg, who were finally released by the Bush Administration after years of imprisonment, torture, and other punishments without ever being charged with a crime, were extradited to the United Kingdom. There, the British government held the four men and questioned the, then released them from its own custody. The British government declared that there was no evidence that the men were of any criminal threat to anybody.
The United States Department of Defense, on the other hand, still insists that the four men it released still pose a “significant threat”. As I noted in my last article on the subject, this continued insistence by the Bush Administration of the guilt of these four men is truly bizarre, given the fact that the men were never charged with any crime, much less put on trial. If the four prisoners were truly a “significant threat”, then why on Earth didn’t the United States keep them in custody and put them on trial so that they could be legally imprisoned for a long period of time?
The likely answer is simple: The United States really has no evidence that the four men it released from custody have committed any crime at all. After all, the Bush Administration’s arrangement for trials allowed for extremely loose standards of justice that favored easy prosecution through military tribunals many legal experts have characterized as kangaroo courts. If there were any reasonable evidence against these four men, the Bush Administration would have used it by now.
The sham of the Guantanamo imprisonment is clearly shown by what the Bush Administration has attempted to claim as evidence against one of the four men: Moazzam Begg. During his time in American custody, first at a prison in Bagram, Afghanistan and then at Guantanamo Bay, Mr. Begg was exposed to cruel and inhuman conditions designed to erode his mental stamina to the point that he would no longer be able to resist American interrogations. Indeed, it now appears that agents of the American government interrogated Mr. Begg over 300 times. Mr. Begg could not have toilet paper, a toothbrush, a cup for drinking water, or even basic medical attention, unless he was “cooperative” with interrogators. The definition of being cooperative at Guantanamo Bay was, apparently, agreeing to do whatever his interrogators told him to do, including making false confessions.
So, after hundreds of interrogation sessions over years of captivity and abuse, what kind of confession was the American government able to wring out of Mr. Begg’s tortured mind? The American interrogators got Moazzam Begg to confess that he was indeed one of the men shown in a video attending a meeting with Osama Bin Laden himself. That sounds pretty juicy, doesn’t it? I mean, here was Mr. Begg, admitting to his interrogators that he was right there, on videotape, meeting with Osama Bin Laden, planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Pretty chilling stuff, huh?
Well, not really. It turns out that there is no possible way that Mr. Begg could have been one of the men on that videotape, standing with Osama Bin Laden. You see, after the proud American interrogators shared their supposed “evidence”, wrung out of Mr. Begg through years of torture and manipulation, with British intelligence agents, the British agents returned with evidence that proved without a doubt that Mr. Begg was in Britain at the time that the video of Osama Bin Laden was made.
The confession of Mr. Begg was completely bogus, but it is no surprise that American interrogators were able to get him to make it. After all, it has been documented that as part of the interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, prisoners are told that they will not be allowed to eat until they tell interrogators what they want to hear. Or, they’re made to lie on the floor, chained so that they cannot move, defecating and urinating on themselves, until they tell interrogators what they want to hear. Or they’re beaten, or stripped naked, or left for long times in solitary confinement, or groped by female guards… After years of such treatment, a prisoner will say anything to get just a little relief. The prisoner might even believe it.
Research into interrogation methods has clearly shown that confessions obtained through the use of torture, inhumane treatment, and long-term mental manipulation are worthless. That’s why the most respected experts in the military and intelligence agencies say that torture should never be used – it completely ruins the ability of American agents to obtain credible information, and makes it impossible to prosecute even the worst criminals.
On a happy note, Moazzam Begg has now seen one of his daughters for the first time. His wife, Sally, was pregnant with their fourth child when American and Pakistani soldiers came in the middle of the night and threw him in the trunk of a car without explanation.
That’s right – Mr. Begg, who our government imprisoned and tortured for years without ever bringing a criminal charge, has a wife named Sally.
It shouldn’t matter, but for some Americans, foreign-sounding names make the prisoners we drag through hell sound less than completely human. It’s easy for us to tolerate the torture of a man named Moazzam Begg, but it’s much harder to make excuses for the illegal imprisonment of the husband of a woman named Sally.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the American people could stretch their minds enough to consider that while there’s no evidence of any crime by a man named Moazzam, there is a huge load of evidence that a man named George has committed serious crimes against international and domestic American law?
Not holding her breath,
Mother Davis
Nice to know the English did something helpful.