Guantanamo, the torture and us

At the end of the letter written by a Yemeni prisoner published in the New York Times on April 14th of this year, there were several hundred readers’ comments. One of  them said “I agree with Senator McCain, who was himself a victim of torture. When another senator said to him “why should we be so bothered about these terrorists?”, McCain replied “ This isn’t about who they are, but about who we are: we are the United States of America, and the United States of America does not do torture.”

In his letter, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, 35, describes in minute detail the torments of force-feeding through a nasal drip. (Daniele Raineri wrote about this in this paper last April 17th).

“I have been a prisoner at Guantanamo for the last eleven years, I have never been formally charged with anything, nor have I ever been tried…It was alleged that I was “one of Osama Bin Laden’s  body guards”, something completely absurd, straight out of one of those American films I used to like. Even they didn’t seem to believe it any more… I will never forget the first time they inserted the tube up my nose. They tied me to a chair twice a day. I never knew when they would come, sometimes it would be during the night… on March 15th I was sick, in the prison hospital, and I refused to eat. A team from the Extreme Reaction Force (dubbed euphemistically the Forcible Cell Extraction) burst in. They bound me hand and foot to the bed and then forced a drip feed into my hand. I spent some twenty six hours in this state, totally immobile; I wasn’t even allowed to go to the bathroom. They forced a catheter into me, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I wasn’t even permitted to pray.. during the force-feeding the nurse shoved the tube deep into my stomach. I begged her to let me be, but she said no.  Just as they were finishing, a bit of that “food” ended up on my prison clothes. I asked them to change me, but the guard refused me even this very basic form of human dignity.”

What I am talking about is force-feeding.  (Something which, mutatis mutandis, the law of the land would have liked to subject all the citizens of our own country to.)

You will have read about the sealed deportation trains, and the terrible humiliation of being deprived of adequate facilities for normal bodily functions. I have interviewed elderly Chechens who were deported to Kazakhstan or to Siberia under Stalin. They were things that we cannot discuss. They would bow their heads, and mumble about how many people on the trains would just let themselves perish from the shame of it all.

A friend of mine said; “I hear that the New York Times paid the standard rate for the Yemeni prisoner’s article (€150), and the money was sent to his family back in Yemen. I confess to thinking, and then feeling guilty for thinking it, “who knows what they will do with that money, will they spend it on food for hungry children, or will they put it to building a bomb like the one which exploded in Boston, which cost $100?”

There you have it. My friend’s moment of dilemma helped remind me how, beyond the basic principle of it, there is a difference between prevention and repression. With the supposedly dangerous prisoners detained without charge in Guantanamo, and rendered dangerous, the difference between the two has been eliminated. Repression wants to be a form of prevention. But food for children isn’t a real alternative, for those who think along these lines: feed some hungry kids in Gaza or Lebanon or Pakistan, and perhaps one of them, without even waiting to grow up completely, will put on a suicide vest and go blow himself up in a crowd group of “the enemy”. But we can’t simply starve half – or more – of the world’s children. They’re probably hungry enough as it is. We can’t really even starve just one of them, enough to send them back to their Creator.

Let’s just think for a moment about the part of the world in which we live. On April 16th a prisoner of Swiss nationality aged thirty two in the canton of Zurich who had been found guilty in 2009 of attempted homicide, died in the hospital to which he had been transferred, after beginning a hunger strike back in January. He had refused all medical help, and his legal right to starve himself to death was recognized by the authorities.

On April 30th in the United Sates, while President Obama confirmed his intention to close Guantanamo, the president of the American Medical Association protested against force-feeding: “any patient has the right to reject it, even if his or her life depends upon it”.

On April 21st, the Independent published the declaration of another prisoner at Guantanamo, Shaker Ameer, a 45 year old Saudi. He too has been detained there for the last eleven years, having been acquitted of every charge as long ago as 2007. He wrote “The great Orwellian lie is that to keep 166 prisoners at Guantanamo somehow manages to keep the United Sates safe from terrorism, of the 779 detainees there in 2001, some 613 have been sent home, and of the remaining prisoners the US has acquitted a further 86, who are however still detained here. So more than 90% of the original total of prisoners have been acquitted, whom the US authorities admit to have unfairly detained.”

So perhaps has Obama resigned himself to being defeated in his stated desire of closing Guantanamo down? Perhaps fearing a downturn in his poll ratings, or maybe simply giving in to pressure from the anti-terrorism community: even to an American president it is possible to say, hey, just let us get on with the job. There may be an even ore powerful explanation: the fear that one, or some of the detainees, once released, might be moved to commit acts of terrorism against US citizens. (A specific moratorium against the repatriation of Yemeni detainees was decided by Obama). A similar scenario to this could cost him very dear in political terms. One could also contemplate a human rather than a purely instrumental, aspect to this policy: if some of the prisoners were to be freed on his orders, and then they were to commit crimes against American citizens (or anyone else), Obama would carry a very heavy responsibility.

I would suggest comparing this situation with the routine followed by Italy’s magistrati di sorveglianza (investigative judges with a special responsibility for deciding issues of bail, house arrest, work and day release), who with a few notable exceptions, are unbelievably reluctant to apply the discretionary measures which Italian law affords them – and which constant Ministry of Justice circulars encourage them to use – in deciding conditional release on a case by case basis. All the statistics show those prisoners who are released on the above conditions are far less likely to re-offend than those who remain inside prison for the whole length of their sentences.

But the bureaucratic administration of the magistrati di sorveglianza, both profoundly indolent and self regarding, is always extremely sensitive to the risks of a “bad press”: a convicted criminal serving part of his sentence on conditional release in the community who commits another – possibly lurid and spectacular - crime, is very bad news indeed. So even in the Italian case, judges – on whose decision the total or conditional freedom of detainees hangs – are frequently held back by their sincere concerns of what might happen if  “things go wrong”, for which they would be held responsible – even when the statistics clearly demonstrate that the risk factor  is very low.

There can be no real comparison between the executive powers of the president of the United States and of our magistrati di sorveglianza – but the psychological mechanism governing their decisions in such cases is very similar.  There is also another important difference. At least our judges are dealing with prisoners – at least in theory - who have been tried and found guilty of a specific crime. President Obama is dealing with people who have neither been formally charged nor tried in a court of law, some of whom are now recognized to be entirely innocent, even though they may still be considered to be “potentially dangerous”. In the case of Guantanamo, both the length and the conditions of imprisonment are so brutal that they would be quite likely to turn even the most innocent and harmless of the detainees into angry men with an urgent score to settle. One could say that this is an exemplary case of of  “legal violence” which provokes a violent response, to the extent that every possible modification is rendered impossible: a form of “legal kidnapping” where the release of the victim is impossible – even when he has become a burden – since his freedom is in itself represents a threat.

It’s a vicious circle from which it would be possible to escape only if the pressure of public opinion in favour of closing Guantanamo were to become stronger than the pressure in favour of keeping it opinion. And that’s very unlikely.

And here is another spectacular contradiction thrown up by the bizarre logic of the conventional anti-terrorism strategy: the Guantanamo authorities are forcibly keeping alive those that they consider their enemies, by preventing them from dying through violent means. Turning the concept of “sentencing them to death”, they have been “sentenced to life”, as it were. That is because they would be more dangerous dead than alive. Behind this latest mass hunger strike at Guantanamo – with almost a hundred adherents – there has been the latest in a series of confiscations of Korans, and possibly the death of another Yemeni hunger striker on February 6th.

I know what prison is like, it is repugnant, ferocious, “normal”. My only advantage is that I have a greater insight than most into what it must be like to be banged up in Guantanamo. “There are lots of us who are on hunger strike this time, and there aren’t nearly enough qualified medical staff  to force-feed us all, nothing happens at regular intervals… they feed some people continuously to hold them back “. Next we read that since the hunger strikers are now 100 out of 166 (and according to one of the defendants, 136) the authorities have flown in another 42 medics and nurses to cope with the emergency. Closing my eyes, I’m trying to imagine 92 bodies tied down hand and foot to 92 prison beds or chairs, while fifty medics and nurses rush continually between them forcing the drip feeds up 92 noses and the drip to 92 hands, like some crazed human survival production line. I don’t know if anything quite like it has ever happened before: worse that this, I’m sure, more brutal, certainly, more evil, tick….  but something quite like this, never.

And so now we can complete the impression of the contradiction of the jailers who keep their sworn enemies alive, also because they were captured before the era of the drones – long distance and anonymous elimination, without the smell of death. The kamikaze combatants had already invented the ultimate weapon – their own bodies, on a massive scale, in constant waves: how can one intimidate or repress people who not only have no fear of death, but indeed relish the idea of it? Here we find ourselves facing  the corollary to the wretched American obsession with the death penalty: make them stay alive against their will. No, perhaps not live, but just survive, not die. They are not allowed to commit suicide, not even that most tenacious and desperate form of suicide, starving oneself to death.  Anyone who thinks that they have an unassailable argument against the right to commit suicide, that right to die by self starvation which was recognized by the courts of the Canton of Zurich, has here a very concrete example by which to measure their own intransigence. People are kept alive in Guantanamo for ever, but in such horrendous conditions as to make them prefer their own death, whilst forbidding them to die.
 

Postscript.
Everything that happens in that living hell of Guantanamo also takes place in any one of our “normal” prisons in Italy: such as treating the inmates in such a demeaning way as to induce them to attempt suicide, and indeed sometimes they succeed. Afterwards, invariably someone complains that they could have been stopped with a more active, round the clock surveillance system. But a truly efficient surveillance system is practically impossible – and even if it were possible – an empty cell, an naked prisoner, padded walls, being watched 24 hours a day either through the spy hole or by CCTV – would deprive any prisoner of the will to do anything, except kill himself, or be killed, at the first available opportunity.

I wouldn’t say that enemies don’t exist. The Old Testament is all about enemies, whereas the New Testament doesn’t deny their existence, it just says to love them. We can twist and turn any way we like around this aporia – this philosophical conundrum. Turning the other cheek is a wonderful metaphor, but it is impossible to apply in practical terms, at least for me. Not when the first or the second cheek aren’t yours anyway, or when those cheeks of others belong to people who have just cropped up – in a bad way - on your path. I just tell myself that one principal worth following (somewhat random, and by no means universal or definitive) is that you should never be so cruel or harsh in your treatment of them, that the shame and compassion engendered by your excessively cruel manner exceeds, or even cancels out, whatever they have done, however enormous their misdeeds may have been. (And even more so, when that harsh treatment is meted out on someone who is in fact innocent of the charges).

This is what has happened to the Guantanamo prisoners. And that’s not even to mention the simple economics of it all: Guantanamo has already cost the United States – and not only them, but “us” too – more than a battle or two lost along the way. More to the point, the human condition, unlike economics, cannot be relativized.  166 men are being held indeterminately without the right to a fair trial at Guantanamo. They are in a kind of limbo, outside the normal political and legal geography, in a strip of Cuba which is both extra-territorial and extra-judicial. And – or but – they are human beings. In those very extreme conditions, with their bare hands and exhausted bodies the prisoners rebelled against their planned transfer from a common dormitory to separate cells. Their rebellion was put down with the aid of “non lethal bullets”.

I have anguished about the issue of torture ever since I was young: the belief in the intrinsic value of some sort of test of strength was very much part of the upbringing for my generation, as hard as that might be to believe today: physical courage, faith in a moral ideal and loyalty towards ones own community. At least in my case, before the heroic examples of the World War II Italian Resistance movement, and the values of the peacetime political Left that grew out of that struggle, that kind of character formation was based on the 19th c. Italian Risorgimento and Irrendentist movement, not to mention other literary models full of goodness and self sacrifice with no specific political agenda: pre- World War I improving novels for young people, like De Amicis’s “Cuore” or Molnar’s “I Ragazzi della via Pal”, for example.

Would one have displayed courage in the face of the enemy? Would one have been proud and dignified when captured by the enemy? Would one have had the courage to resist, and not to betray ones comrades and ones ideals? Summing up the basic values of a post war young man’s moral upbringing, could become a more personal testimony of self education: around that form of generic, but keenly felt idealistic sense of “personal destiny” there revolved a series of important shared experiences and ones first experiences of civil society. I was 16 when Henri Alleg’s shocking book about the Algerian War “La Tortura” was published by Einaudi. In that process of character formation – in my case at least, but I don’t think it was that rare – the “militant dimension” was prevalent, which would in due course assume other forms, which would gradually become more defined, but containing that militancy as its core – the fruit of a fiercely contested “hot” war that had only recently finished, then of a virulent “cold war”, not to mention of many outrageous locally contested wars, some civil, some colonial, some resistance-based.

That was the premise for a short personal story: I had an experience, though singular, of torture. I agonized late in the night in a prison cell, after my esophagus got broken. My cell was a 2.5 per 1.5 mt cubicle, with a squat toilet which had a 30cm wall dividing it from my pillow. I'd stayed on that toilet for hours, fainted first and then unable to move, in my vomit, in my blood, in my excremental. Together with the pain, my head was full of a single sentence “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur”, and its complement, “Inter faeces et urinam we die”. I put myself together just to knock on the wall, my neighbors called for help and I was hospitalized. Little moments of consciousness before the surgery, I was then inducted into coma for several days. Three days after the first surgery, I was tracheostomized. Clinically, I was completely unconscious.

However, as a kind of distorted knowledge emerged - I couldn't speak for a month, and my hands were unable to write - the effects of the powerful anaesthetics I was given, especially curar, I think, left me with a frightening paranoia.I was in the place of the kidnapping, in the hands of secret torturers. They were not aware I knew they were there, and I knew their plot. Later on, we were able to have a laugh on that period. The head of the emergency, a wonderful person with an impressive black beard, was Verchovenskij to me. The purpose of the band was to torture, humiliate and force me to betray myself. In an underground room close to my torture cellar, my jail fellows were buried, forced to lay on their excremental. I had to sympsthyze with them, hence I refused to defecate and urinate, as it was asked me in order to get my humiliation. I knew that if I'd been able to resist, they would have come back and killed me.

I'd even thought my family was part of the plot. Unable to speak, I was sure I told them all about the plot against me and my fellows, and I wasn't able to understand their inaction. There was an old nurse who came and hit me regularly - then I asked my son to buy king prawns in order to corrupt him, to save me from his brutality (when jailed, king prawns were the favorite prize in soccer or card games, and it was possible to choose them once a week in the shopping lis). That delirium was so vivid - never had something like that in my life, and I wasn't disinclined to any drug, never had such a clear mind - that even today I believe my son had saved my with king prawns. Since then (and it was more than seven years ago) I had a very clear, fightening and fascinating idea of paranoia. And of torture, too.

In those early days, it was supposed to be impossible for me to have any perception of reality, though I was assaulted by white men who immobilized me, trying to have me beheaded, and just with a last very effort I was able to defend me with an arm (my arms and all my body were perfectly still), deviating the knife in my throat. I do think that was my way to feel the tracheostomy, fighting against it. The very long clinical story I had (I was declared safe only after several months and several surgeries) was a terrible experience of torture: and it was a cure which I can easily define marvelous for the care and attention given by a lot of people.

This is the way I try to be in a tortured man's shoes. He's not in a delirium, he's right in waiting day and night for a merciless and arbitrary torturer. His body is no longer his, there're several characters playing with his pain and mortification, pushing him till the edge of death - just to pull him back again in order not to lose their game. The tyrants' game gets its training in the relation between humans, even children, and trapped and tortured animals. I can't believe torture is a mean, maybe painful and frightening, a way to a higher end, to get news, to save threatened lives. I do think torture is made for the pleasure of the ones controlling another human being body and life, another person who's just a naked body. It's just like the hunter, when cautioned on his hunting animals - they shouldn't be allowed to “enjoy” their preys' blood, or the hunter won't be able to get them back. When a torturer had rub it in his hostage, alone ore more probably in a group, it will be impossible for him to accept that the tortured could come back to life. It will be to much for him to see the other alive, knowing such a secret of his - this is why for instance in some group rapes the most cruel tortures win over sexual satisfaction, leading to the victims' murder.

Let's reverse to Guantánamo now.

The Human Rights Report 2012 of the U.S. Department of State on Italy - released on April 19 - is a very interesting document. Wide and detailed. Let's focus on the index here.

“Principal human rights problems included the continued incarceration of pretrial detainees with convicted criminals, substandard living conditions in overcrowded prisons and detention centers for undocumented migrants, and societal prejudice and some municipal mistreatment of Roma, which exacerbated their social exclusion and restricted their access to education, health care, employment, and other social services. Other human rights problems included an excessive and abusive use of force by police in some cases, an inefficient judicial system that did not always provide speedy justice, government corruption, violence and harassment against women, sexual exploitation of children, and anti-Semitic vandalism. Trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation occurred. Observers also reported cases of violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons and labor discrimination based on sexual orientation. Child labor and labor exploitation of irregular workers were also problems, especially in the south”.

The Report underlines the “the lack of a law criminalizing Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishmen”. You can read carefully, appreciating it. Incarceration of pretrial detainees, substandard living conditions, lack of a law criminalizing torture...then while you're reading, a name flashes in your mind: Guantánamo. Talking form the pulpit of Guantánamo. Here's an example of the price the U.S. have to pay for the supposed convenience of that extraterritorial and extralegal jail.

From an Italian point of view, it's a comparison which rectifies the lack of credibility  of  the American source, offering an excuse for the misbehavior of the Italian justice at the same time. Let's try to think at the enormous reach of the comparison in Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan (as far as China is concerned, they're already issuing the “Human Rights Record of the United States”, official way of propaganda, where the main dishes are obviously Guantánamo Bay and CIA detention structures). When considered from the places in the world where the Islamic terrorism is bred, Guantánamo has a very high price, the scandal in the hearts - much more than a lost battle.

(translation by William Ward and Sarah Marion Tuggey)

L'articolo in italiano