GUANTANAMO Bay. Like New Labour, the War on Terror, George Bush and Tony Blair – the name may seem like a relic of a bygone age to you by now, a fragment of millennium politics. But almost two decades on from the fall of New York’s Twin Towers and the burning of Lower Manhattan, you may not be aware that the American prison camp on the south-east coast of Cuba remains open. Forty men are still caught in the vortex of this legal black hole and the monstrous failure of justice it represents.
Having survived the tenure of Barack Obama in the White House, Donald Trump has indicated he intends to keep the facility open indefinitely. And this week, five of the men detained there are facing trial before military commission assembled on the island. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men are accused of playing a pivotal role in organising the 9/11 attack in 2001. If convicted, all five defendants face the death penalty.
But this week, the trial has been hearing about how these men have been treated during their incarceration. This week’s star witness has been Dr James Mitchell. Formerly a contract psychologist to the CIA, Mitchell was tasked with shattering the resistance of the men who found themselves trafficked into Guantanamo from every corner of the world. Under his direction, the site – and hundreds like it scattered across the archipelagos and nations of the world – amplified and refined the notorious “five techniques” used by the British State in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Stress positions. Various kinds of deprivation and excess: cold, noise, light, sustenance.
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Dr Mitchell perfected the techniques, did the dirty work himself, and picked up $81 million for his trouble for training the next generation of American torturers. And he doesn’t give a damn.
As you will remember, the so-called “War on Terror” was a period of euphemisms and legalistic cliches. Cynical Bush administration lawyers made legalese mainstream. Government policy was a series of angels dancing on pinheads. The detainees weren’t prisoners of war, they were “enemy combatants.” It wasn’t torture or inhuman and degrading treatment – the “interrogation techniques” were just “enhanced.”
They weren’t governed by the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the thin protocols of constitutional justice in the United States – so the commander-in-chief and the military could do whatever they liked with them.
At least thumbscrews and the rack have a kind of intellectual integrity to them. They look monstrous because they are monstrous. Trust the Americans to prove that even the rank old trade of torturer isn’t immune from their dedication to corporate perkiness and capacity to sanitise wickedness behind meaningless cliches.
In just over two weeks, the evidence suggests a three-man team, including the psychologist, waterboarded the principal accused, Mohammed, 183 times.
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Questioned this week by lawyers for the five men about what they experienced behind the bars of Guantanamo, Mitchell was a combative witness. Insisting the CIA “was never interested in prosecutions,” he told the hearing “the CIA was not going to let them set off another catastrophic attack in the United States. They were going to go right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it and lean forward.”
Unrepentant, the former contract psychologist told the military hearing that “I’d get up today and do it again.” Choking up – presumably overwhelmed by patriotic feelings – the cold-eyed architect of the United States’ torture programme told the military tribunal: “I thought my moral duty to protect American lives outweighed the feelings of discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us. To me it just seemed like it would be dereliction of my moral responsibilities.”
This is old logic. The end justifies the means. The greatest good for the greatest number. Law and rights are all very well, but we’re at war, son. And all these guys are terrorists, right? Who cares.
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Implicit in Dr Mitchell’s testimony is the false claim that all of the men who passed through his hands – and the hands of those he trained to mentally and physically break any suspects the CIA got hold of – were guilty of any crime, or had any useful intelligence to bequeath to the apparatus of the American secret state. Many did not. Fearful, tormented men will tell you anything but the truth. The torment was real, the “evidence” junk.
Whatever euphemisms you clothe it in, however successfully you sanitise your behaviour for the American public or for your own conscience, this was torture, torture for profit, torture which did no good and left behind it scores of men, broken in body and spirit, basic rights and norms trampled over, and torturers like James Mitchell, forever stained in their blood.
You may have heard Hannah Arendt’s (above) line about “the banality of evil”. Reports from the hearings reminded me of it this week. Coined during her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his involvement in coordinating the Holocaust, Arendt was struck by the Nazi’s blandness. He spoke in slogans. He thought in slogans. He imagined in slogans. He wasn’t a conscious sadist like Shindler’s List’s Amon Goth. Eichmann seemed banefully ordinary.
IN drama, the devil has all the best tunes. Evil twirls its moustache. Evil has a glint in the eye. Evil chortles. But in the real world – in the world of Adolf Eichmann with his efficient rota of trains, in the world of Dr Mitchell and his drowning rooms – evil has no charisma. Evil, often as not, has a bureaucrat, a dry eye and a dumb, unempathetic face.
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And discovering the banality of this, for Arendt, is even more terrifying than the diabolical villains we love to depict in our dramas. You’re sitting next to it on the bus. In the right conditions, any one of us might cut a diabolical figure, diabolically ordinary.
“This normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together,” she reflected.
In reflecting on its own history, in Northern Ireland and the wider world, the UK Government seems incapable of anything but jingoism. But the record is clear. Britain is complicit in this, as enablers, whispering friends, apologists and defenders. The last prisoner who had been a resident of Britain was released from Guantanamo Bay in October 2015.
Having been detained in February 2002, Shaker Aamer (above) was never tried nor convicted of any offence. He spent more than 13 years in the detention centre, subject to the textbook array of torments Dr James Mitchell does not regret devising.
A psychologist, instructed by the organisation Reprieve to examine the ex-prisoner, had this to say about how his treatment at the hands of the CIA had affected him. “He feels irritable, sad, angry, hopeless, and helpless,” she reflected. “Additionally, Mr Aamer is fearful of using the toilet. Because the opportunity to do so was often withheld from him during interrogations he associates his ongoing painful urinary retention, constipation, and efforts to relieve himself with memories of being interrogated.”
That detail about the toilet has always got to me. It seems so small a thing, so heartbreakingly quotidian. The banality of evil, its doers, and the consequences.
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