The Rag Blog

Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guantanamo was the sort of place where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a recalcitrant prisoner “extracted” from a cell for training purposes, could be beaten almost senseless. This actually happened to 35 year-old “model soldier” Sean Baker, who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to Guantanamo and he volunteered to be just such a “prisoner,” donning the requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his “extraction” and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular epileptic-style seizures ten to twelve times a day. (And remember the Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing that he wasn’t a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing the job.)

If you happened to be an actual prisoner — putting aside the female interrogators who smeared red paint (meant to mimic menstrual blood) on Arab detainees as a form of humiliation — you might end up like this:

“The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”

Or this:

”I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing.”

Or this:

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.”

These were, in fact, descriptions provided by outraged FBI agents assigned to Guantanamo in 2004 in memos or emails to their bosses back on the mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that “military personnel beat and kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison as military police snapped pictures,” and so on.

Ah, but those were the good old days when Guantanamo was the real “24” — the only problem being that there wasn’t a “ticking bomb” prisoner in sight, just a former Australian professional kangaroo skinner, who had joined the Taliban before September 11, 2001 and never fired a shot at American forces, as well as a man who was supposedly Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur. That was kind of top o’ the line for the prisoners Guantanamo held until, last September, the real bad guys — 14 of them – were transferred there from the CIA’s secret prisons and torture chambers elsewhere on the planet.

Now, Karen Greenberg, Tomdispatch regular and co-editor of The Torture Papers, has visited the new Guantanamo and she offers us an up-to-date lesson in Gitmo decorum. Tom

Guantanamo Is Not a Prison
11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the Pentagon
By Karen J. Greenberg

Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with actual prisoners) designed to “make transparent” the base, its facilities, and its manifold contributions to our country’s national security.

The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire, set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters for “compliant” inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful information.

In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo, regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American offshore prisons… or, to be Pentagon-accurate, “detention facilities.”

1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a “detention facility.” Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as well), it is not acceptable to use the word “prison” while at Gitmo.

2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only enemies, specifically, “unlawful enemy combatants.” One of my colleagues was even chastised for using the word “detainee.” “Detained enemy combatants” or “unlawful enemy combatants,” we learned, were the proper terms.

A Los Angeles man was sentenced to eight months in a military prison after he was convicted today of desertion for refusing to deploy to Iraq.

Army Spc. Agustin Aguayo, 35, whose court-martial was held in Wurtzburg, Germany, fled his Army base in Germany last summer for California. He had faced a maximum of seven years in prison.

Aguayo had been jailed for 161 days awaiting trial and his attorney, David Court, said he did not expect him to serve more than about six more weeks.

After fleeing Germany, Aguayon surfaced in California, then turned himself in Sept. 26 at Fort Irwin.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Aguayo told reporters before his surrender. “I’m not a deserter or a coward. I just felt that I needed to be unavailable for this [deployment] because I have come to believe that it is so wrong.”

“In the global war on terrorism, we need everybody rowing the boat,” Maj. Robert Whittle, one of Aguayo’s commanding officers, told the Stars and Stripes newspaper last fall while the soldier was still missing.

Aguayo, he said, “volunteered to serve in the military. We would like him to fulfill the commitment he made and rejoin the team.”

The case is being closely watched by American antiwar groups that have taken up Aguayo’s cause and raised money for his defense.

“We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation.” – President George W Bush in Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack

While most Americans are concentrating on extricating the US government from the debacle in Iraq, and most peace activists are simultaneously concerned that the Bush administration will launch a war against Iran, the leaders of the Pentagon are planning how to win wars 10, 20, and 50 years from now.

Washington is preparing for every contingency, from rooting out a handful of suspected terrorists halfway around the world to possible wars with Russia and China.

The Defense Department’s drawing boards are groaning under the weight of blueprints for sustaining total military dominance of land, sea, air and outer space throughout this century. The costs of supporting the US government’s martial propensities will be astronomical in terms of the social programs and benefits denied American working people, not to mention the consequences of living in a state of permanent warfare.

The recent decision to escalate the Iraq war with a “surge” of 21,000 more troops, the plan to increase the armed forces by another 92,000 troops, and President George W Bush’s request for US$716 billion to meet the Pentagon’s warmaking needs in fiscal year 2008 are a harbinger of what’s coming next – new technologies for fighting future wars on the ground, improvements in the nuclear stockpile and delivery systems, and the militarization of outer space, among other military goals.

The Pentagon’s futuristic war plans and the 2008 war budget leave no doubt that the US has discarded president George Washington’s warning in 1796 to avoid “overgrown military establishments”, or president Dwight D Eisenhower’s advice in 1961 to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex”.

The 2008 war budget not only exceeds the combined military budgets of the rest of the world’s nations, but means the cost of Bush’s “war on terrorism” (including Iraq and Afghanistan) amounts to more in inflation-adjusted dollars than the cost of the Korean or Vietnam wars.

Washington’s ever-expanding forces of war, combined with more than 750 major military bases around the world to secure America’s economic and political empire, mean that the United States, despite the absence of helmeted brutes in hobnailed boots parading on cobblestone streets, is a militaristic society that is a danger to world peace.

“Today, as never before in their history,” writes Andrew J Bacevich in his stunning book The New American Militarism, [1] “Americans are enthralled with military power. The global supremacy that the US presently enjoys – and is bent on perpetuating – has become central to our national identity. Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, [and] have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness [and] military action.”

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Insurgents have sought to intensify attacks during a Baghdad security crackdown and additional U.S. forces will be sent to areas outside the capital where militant groups are regrouping, the new commander of U.S. forces in
Iraq said Thursday.

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus said the troop buildups outside Baghdad will focus on Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, a growing hotbed for suspected Sunni extremists fleeing the U.S.-Iraqi security operation in Baghdad.

But Petraeus stressed that military force alone is “not sufficient” to end the violence in Iraq and political talks must eventually include some militant groups now opposing the U.S.-backed government.

“This is critical,” Petraeus said in his first news conference since taking over command last month. He noted that such political negotiations “will determine in the long run the success of this effort.”

Petraeus listed a series of high-profile attacks since U.S. and Iraqi forces began the security sweep three weeks ago, including a suicide blast at a mostly Shiite university and an assassination attempt against one of Iraq’s vice presidents.

The
Pentagon has pledged 17,500 combat troops to the capital. Petraeus has said the full contingent should not be in place until early June. He declined to say how many U.S. forces will be deployed to Diyala, which the group al-Qaida in Iraq has made one its main staging grounds.

Military officials believe many insurgents have shifted from Baghdad to Diyala to escape the security operation.

“Car bombs have targeted hundreds of Iraqis,” Petraeus said. He also denounced the wave of other attacks, including the “thugs with no soul” who have killed more than 150 Shiite pilgrims in the past three days.

More than 30 Vermont towns passed resolutions on Tuesday seeking to impeach President Bush, while at least 16 towns in the tiny New England state called on Washington to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

Known for picturesque autumn foliage, colonial inns, maple sugar and old-fashion dairy farms, Vermont is in the vanguard of a grass-roots protest movement to impeach Bush over his handling of the unpopular Iraq war.

“We’re putting impeachment on the table,” said James Leas, a Vermont lawyer who helped to draft the resolutions and is tracking the votes. “The people in all these towns are voting to get this process started and bring the troops home now.”

The resolutions passed on Vermont’s annual town meeting day — a colonial era tradition where citizens debate issues of the day big and small — are symbolic and cannot force Congress to impeach Bush, but they “may help instigate further discussions in the legislature,” said state Rep. David Zuckerman.

“The president must be held accountable,” said Zuckerman, a politician from Burlington, Vermont’s largest city.

After casting votes on budgets and other routine items, citizens of 32 towns in Vermont backed a measure calling on the U.S. Congress to file articles of impeachment against Bush for misleading the nation on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and for engaging in illegal wiretapping, among other charges.

Five Vermont towns passed similar resolutions last year.

The idea of impeaching Bush resides firmly outside the political mainstream.

The new Democratic-controlled Congress has steered clear of the subject, and Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold’s call last year to censure Bush — a step short of an impeachment — found scant support on Capitol Hill, even among fellow Democrats.

Let’s start with the obvious waste. We know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, that almost two million may have fled to other countries, and that possibly millions more have been displaced from their homes in ethnic-cleansing campaigns. We also know that an estimated 4.5 million Iraqi children are now malnourished and that this is but “the tip of the iceberg” in a country where diets are generally deteriorating, while children are dying of preventable diseases in significant numbers; that the Iraqi economy is in ruins and its oil industry functioning at levels significantly below its worst moments in Saddam Hussein’s day — and that there is no end in sight for any of this.

We know that, while the new crew of American military officials in Baghdad are starting to tout the “successes” of the President’s “surge” plan, they actually fear a collapse of support at home within the next half-year, believe they lack the forces necessary to carry out their own plan, and doubt its ultimate success. What a tragic waste.

We know that while the U.S. military focuses on the Iraqi capital and al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, taking casualties in both places, fleeing Iraqi refugees are claiming that jihadis have largely taken over the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, and renamed it “the Islamic Emirate of Samarra” — a grim sign indeed. (Here’s just one refugee’s assessment: “that large areas of the farms around Samarra have been transformed into camps like those of Al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.”)

We know that, as the U.S. military concentrates its limited forces and the minimal Iraqi units that fight with them, in a desperate battle to control the capital, for both Sunnis and Shia, the struggle simply spreads to less well-defended areas. We also know that the Sunni insurgents have been honing their tactics around Baghdad, their attacks growing deadlier on the ground and more accurate against the crucial helicopter support system which makes so much of the American occupation possible. Some of them have also begun to wield a new, potentially exceedingly deadly and indiscriminate weapon — trucks filled with chlorine gas, essentially homemade chemical weapons on wheels which can be blown up at any moment.

War and corruption have crippled Iraq’s ability to export oil. But that’s not stopping Big Oil’s efforts to control and profit from what’s left.

By Christian Parenti, The Nation. Posted March 6, 2007

Iraq’s postwar oil bonanza remains a mirage. The country has the second- or third-largest reserves in the world, making petroleum the heart and vast bulk of its economy. Thus in March 2003 did Paul Wolfowitz assure Congress that Iraq would “finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” American planners predicted that Iraq’s oil production would triple to a feverish 6 million barrels per day by 2010.

Instead war, corruption, sectarian slaughter and a massive crime wave have reduced the country’s once mighty petroleum sector to an industrial zombie: still ambulatory, functional but essentially dead.

Despite this, oil majors and the International Monetary Fund have been pressuring Iraq to pass a thoroughly free-market hydrocarbons law that would allow foreign companies to make huge profits from Iraq’s petroleum. A draft of the law has just been released; the Iraqi Cabinet has approved it and sent it on to Iraq’s Parliament for debate and approval in March.

But is Big Oil really poised for total victory in Iraq? Such an outcome is hard to imagine, at least in the near term, given the likelihood of opposition from Iraqis and, more important, the spiraling chaos: Iraq is a society in meltdown with no real state to speak of. Many politicians have fled Iraq, rarely risking trips back to Baghdad, so even achieving a basic parliamentary quorum can be difficult. Controlling and profiting from Iraq’s oil has been the goal of the oil majors, but they do not write history unmolested by the momentum of events and competing agendas.

Nor does the proposed oil law simply serve Iraq up on a plate to the oil giants. One London-based oil analyst who expected a more decentralized and free-market law called it “bloody confused.” On key questions of foreign investment and regional decentralization versus centralized control, the law is vague but not all bad. In general terms it reaffirms state control over oil and binds Iraq’s Sunni center and Shiite south to the Kurdish north by re-creating a single Iraqi National Oil Company, which will in turn dole out oil income to the regions on a per-capita basis. This might help de-escalate sectarian conflict.

But the law leaves plenty of problematic wiggle room: All its important details are left for later resolution by a new Federal Oil and Gas Council to be controlled by the prime minister, which will effectively bypass Parliament. And while the law asserts a set of generally nationalist economic goals, it sets no minimum level for state participation, nor does it cap the amount of profits allowed to foreign firms.

Among the Iraqi political class there is pervasive confusion about the new law, but there is also a deep resource nationalism that opposes selling off the country’s patrimony. My interviews with Iraqi oil experts, politicians and regular people revealed a quite reasonable and balanced view of the situation: Most felt that foreign participation in the oil sector could be helpful in reviving an industry battered by a fifteen-year nightmare of war, sanctions, more war and now anarchy. But no one felt Iraq should have to enslave itself to the will of Shell, BP or ExxonMobil.

03/05/07 “ICH” — — It was a struggle between the United States and the Third World. What there was, was people all over the Third World fighting for economic and political changes against US-supported repressive regimes, or setting up their own progressive governments. These acts of self-determination didn’t coincide with the needs of the American power elite, and so the United States moved to crush those governments and movements even though the Soviet Union was playing virtually no role at all in these scenarios. (It is remarkable the number of people who make fun of conspiracy theories but who accepted without question the existence of an International Communist Conspiracy.)

Washington officials of course couldn’t say that they were intervening to block economic or political change, so they called it “fighting communism”, fighting a communist conspiracy, fighting for freedom and democracy.

I’m reminded of all this because of a recent article in the Washington Post about El Salvador. It concerned two men who had been on opposite sides in the civil war of 1980-1992. One was José Salgado, who had been a government soldier, and is now the mayor of San Miguel, El Salvador’s second-largest city.

Salgado enthusiastically embraced the scorched-earth tactics of his army bosses, the Post reports, even massacres of children, the elderly, the sick — entire villages. It was all in the name of beating back communism, Salgado says he remembers being told. But he’s now haunted by doubts about what he saw, what he did, and even why he fought. A US-backed war that was defined at the time as a battle against communism is now seen by former government soldiers and former guerrillas as less a conflict about ideology and more a battle over poverty and basic human rights.

“We soldiers were tricked,” says Salgado. “They told us the threat was communism. But I look back and realize those weren’t communists out there that we were fighting — we were just poor country people killing poor country people.”

Salgado says he once thought that the guerrillas dreamed of communism, but now that those same men are his colleagues in business and politics, he is learning that they wanted what he wanted: prosperity, a chance to move up in the world, freedom from repression.

All of which makes what they see around them today even more heartbreaking and frustrating. For all their sacrifices, El Salvador is still among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere — more than 40 percent of Salvadorans live on less than $2 a day, according to the United Nations. The country is still racked by violence, still scarred by corruption. For some the question remains: Was it all worth it?

“We gave our blood, we killed our friends and, in the end, things are still bad,” says Salgado. “Look at all this poverty, and look how the wealth is concentrated in just a few hands.”

The guerrillas Salgado once fought live with the same doubts. Former guerrilla Benito Argueta laments that the future didn’t turn out as he’d hoped. Even though some factions of the coalition of guerrilla armies that fought in the civil war were Marxist, he said, ideology had nothing to do with his decision to take up arms and leave the farm where his father earned only a few colones for backbreaking work. Nor did ideology play a role in motivating his friends in the People’s Revolutionary Army. He remembers fighting “for a piece of land, for the chance that my children might someday get to go to the university.”[1]

The Salvadoran government could never have waged the war as destructively and for as long as it did without a massive influx of military aid and training from Washington — estimated value: six billion dollars; 75,000 Salvadorans dead; about 20 Americans killed or wounded in combat; dissidents today still have to fear right-wing death squads; scarcely any significant social change in El Salvador; the poor remain as ever; a small class of the wealthy still own the country. But never mind. “Communism” was defeated, and El Salvador remains a loyal member of the empire, sending troops to Iraq.[2]

This is not merely of historical interest. A civil war still rages in Colombia. Government soldiers and large numbers of right-wing paramilitary forces, with indispensable and endless military support from the United States, battle “communism”, year after year, decade after decade. The casualties long ago exceeded El Salvador. The irony is monumental, for of those labeled “communist”, a handful of the older ones may have fancied themselves as heirs to Che Guevara 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, but for a long time now the primary motivation of these “left-wing” paramilitary forces has been profits from drugs and kidnapings, obtaining revenge for their comrades’ deaths, and staying alive and avoiding capture. Someday the survivors on both sides may well be expressing sentiments and regrets similar to the Salvadorans above, wondering what the hell it was all really about, or at least wondering what the United States’s obsessive interest in their country was. (For those who may have forgotten, it should be noted that the Soviet Union has not existed since 1991.)