The news report — a scoop by the Washington Post correspondent Dana Priest — was published around Halloween, the holiday when, just for fun, we don devilishly roguish masks and go around scaring people out of their wits. Except in this case it’s deadly earnest and the mask is one with the face.
In her lengthy lead article last week, Priest reported that the CIA maintains a network of Soviet-era prison compounds in eight Eastern European countries, including detention centers in Thailand and Afghanistan, where 100 or more terror suspects are held in underground cells, denied legal rights, outside visitors and checks on their treatment, even by the International Red Cross.
This hidden internment network, according to Priest, is a central element in the CIA’s “unconventional” war on terrorism, a network, however, whose existence has remained secret from the American public and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the agency’s covert actions. These facilities — referred to in classified documents as “black sites” — have been known only to the president and a handful of officials in the United States, and only to the head of state and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
In effect, President Bush has authorized interrogators to subject these nameless, faceless suspects to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment that is illegal in the US. The Eastern European governments that have allowed these prisons on their territory (US officials have prevailed upon the Post not to identify them) would be in clear violation, according to Friso Abbing, a spokesman for the European Union in Brussels, of the European Convention On Human Rights, not to mention the Dec. 10, 1984 UN General Assembly’s Convention Against Torture.
First, there was the disgrace of Guantanamo, beginning on Jan. 11, 2002, when a US military plane from Afghanistan touched down on that strip of dry scrub land on Cuba’s southeastern heel carrying the first 20 of what later became 700 prisoners from 45 countries, arriving there in hoods and shackles.
By all accounts, appalling torture and ill treatment were committed against these detainees, who were denied due process, prisoner-of-war status and the protection of the Geneva Conventions. Reportedly, dozens of suicide attempts, and massive “self-harm action,” were thwarted by the military, when detainees tried to hang themselves with bedding or clothing, with one attempt resulting in permanent brain damage. Last May, Irene Kahn, Amnesty International’s general secretary, launching the group’s annual report, called Guantanamo “the gulag of our time.”
Dick Cheney, the American vice president, however, begged to differ. In an interview with CNN last June, he said that prisoners held there had nothing to complain about since they were “living in the tropics.”
“They got a brand new facility down at Guantanamo,” he said with a straight face. “We spent a lot of money to build it. They’re very well treated there. They’re living in the tropics. The’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want.”
Asked later if it was Cheney’s intention to portray the prison as a holiday camp, an official in his office said that he stood by his comments.
Then came revelations about the outsourcing of torture — sending alleged terror suspects to countries that have no qualms about using torture, including electric shock, to extract information from suspects. The most famous victim of this program, known as “rendition,” was the Syrian-born Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was snatched by CIA agents in September 2002 as he was switching planes in New York and rendered to Syria, where he was held for 10 months in a cell slightly larger than a coffin and taken out periodically for beatings.
Many suspects, nabbed in places like Bosnia, Italy and Sweden, and rendered to countries where they were tortured mercilessly, turned out, like Arar’s, to have tragically been cases of mistaken identity. The happenings at Abu Ghraib, that shocked the world, need no introduction.
No one said it better than former President Jimmy Carter. “Despite George W. Bush’s bold reminder that America is determined to promote freedom and democracy around the world,” he stated six months ago, “the US continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to its reputation as a champion of human rights because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.” He did not mention the “black sites” because clearly he was not at the time privy to information about their existence. Now, thanks to the Post’s Dana Priest, we all are.
The revelations are all the more shocking because the United States, given its unrivaled status as a big power, sets the tone for what is acceptable behavior for other governments worldwide. When it is dismissive of the rule of law and the sanctity of human rights, as it clearly is in this case, it grants license to other governments to commit similar abuses, like those in Israel and Uzbekistan, Syria and Nepal.
Alas, the US, propelled at times in its recent history by the politics of fear, has allowed itself to fall prey to periodic bouts of amnesia about what constitutional guarantees mean in social life — from the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 to the Patriot Act in 2001, and from the internment of 120,000 American citizens in prison camps in 1942 (whose only crime was that they happened to be of Japanese descent) to the early 1950s when the nation allowed a cynical demagogue like Joe McCarthy to ruin the careers of government officials, journalists, writers, filmmakers, actors and others, in his pursuit of mythical communists who he had us believe lurked behind every lamppost, spying for the Soviet Union.
Recovering from each one of these panic attacks, the US always hated itself in the morning. It will do so again when the time comes for it to reflect, in the cold light of hindsight, on the excesses of its “global war on terrorism.”
More than ethnicity, more than territory, and more even than language, what makes a great nation great — what holds it together and defines its character — is the moral authority of its ideals. When these ideals, the backbone of a society’s culture, are subverted, as the Kafkaesque reports about Guantanamo, rendition and now “black sites” attest, the nation is shamed.
For quite a while, this administration has had plans to “introduce” your world, dear reader in the Arab world, to democracy, freedom and human rights — that is, to improve your moral values. I know, the improvement of your moral values may not be the most existentially pressing issue in your life these days (one suspects, in your impoverished condition as an ordinary Arab, a warm coat for your kid this winter is more in order), but in the event that it is, check in with George, Dick, Don, Condi, et.al, and they’ll get you on your way.
