Guantanamo: An American gulag?

Ever since then, the existence of the gulags became the staple of US propaganda against the Soviet system and they disappeared with the latter's collapse. They were then remembered only as an aberration of history. Few, however, thought of their reappearance at the dawn of the 21st century, and that too under aegis of the "free world" with the US at its helm.

It is an irony that the United States that once decried the Soviet system and all which were subsumed in it is at the forefront of the resurrection of the gulag. At least, human rights activists have likened the long irregular string of CIA detention centres from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagmar in Iraq, to many other interrogation facilities across Europe and Africa to a "gulag archipelago" reminiscent of Soviet days.

Obviously the gulags, with their concomitant horrors, are back in full fury and same ugliness. In the name of hunting down Al-Qaeda terrorists, also back are sudden disappearances, indefinite incarceration, and odd-hour knocks on the door.

Whatever way one approaches the matter -- even if one believes that America is under existential threat from Al-Qaeda and all measures are justified in the "war on terror" -- it must be accepted that the prison on the little plot of Cuba is now doing America far more harm than good, because it is an outright slur on its image of being an open society promoting human dignity.

Although the UN was not allowed access to Guantanamo, its experts have compiled a 54-page report as a result of an 18-month investigation based on interviews of the former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and the US officials. It concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners, and combination of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture."

The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques -- prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperature, noise and light, forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation -- constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.

The UN, therefore, called upon the United States to shut down its detention centre at Guantanamo Bay "without further delay." The UN also urged the US to bring all the prisoners to trial or release them and stop subjecting them to abuse. The Human Rights Commission report charged Washington with violating international human rights treaties. According to the report: "The United States government should close down the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and refrain from any practice amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

However, of concern are the attempts by the United States to redefine torture in the framework of the struggle against global terrorism in order to allow certain interrogation techniques that would not be permitted under the internationally accepted definition of torture. The confusion with regard to authorized and unauthorized interrogation techniques has already become alarming in recent times.

Amnesty International (AI) in a statement said that Guantanamo Bay had become a symbol of injustice and abuse in Washington's "war on terror." It must be closed down. AI said that the unlawful detention of "enemy combatants" at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay had now entered its fifth year. Hundreds of people of around 35 nationalities remain held in a legal black hole -- many without access to any court, legal counsel, or family visits.

Many of these detainees state that they have been subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. In desperation, many attempted suicide while others went on prolonged hunger strike, being kept alive only through painful force-feeding measures like placing the striker in a "restraining chair."

But in the White House, no one seems to care about the observations, either of the United Nations or Amnesty International. On the contrary, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman contemptuously called the UN report a "discredit" to the organization:

"Did it not have better things to do?" he asked.

There is every outward sign that the dreadful place called Guantanamo is there to stay, notwithstanding the unanimous feeling of America's allies that Guantanamo should be shut down.

In Soviet gulags, the detainees were subjected to protracted solitude used to be exhausted and subsequently broken down. But in Guantanamo, the inmates are, in addition, subjected to "extraordinary rendition" where they face aggressive interrogation, meaning pure and simple torture. America, in the forefront of the military technological revolution couldn't but excel in its techniques.

Guantanamo will continue to remain not only a colossal disgrace for American values but a colossal liability for its conscience.

Brig (retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS