Guantanamo Secret Project

Four years after the arrival of the first terror suspect in Guantanamo Bay, sometimes referred to as Camp X-Ray or Gitmo, global controversy surrounding the secret internment without trial project continues to increase and there is no sign the camp will be abolished any time soon.

As I reported in April last year, Guantanamo, which still holds close to 500 suspects, is not only a place where interrogations are a major facet of the daily routine but it is also the site of a secret project for recruiting terrorist agents. Shortly after a suspect arrives at the camp he is interrogated. Later, a range of people with varying skills, who were part of the interrogation or observed it, determine whether the suspect should be a candidate for a special project aimed at recruiting terrorist agents – terrorists who can be filtered back into terror ranks to operate on behalf of the CIA and other US intelligence outlets.

When a suspect is selected for the project he is subjected to various forms of in-depth interrogation aimed at breaking his will and making him malleable to suggestion. The process is designed primarily to detach a suspect from any ideological commitment he may have. In order to do that, interrogation is used to expose all his weaknesses - social, sexual, ideological and physical. Knowing where he is weakest is not only a means of breaking his will but also the means by which he can be later controlled.
An experienced interrogator told me the process could best be described as taking a suspect and reducing him to an empty shell which you then fill with the ingredients which you will need to control of him but first you need to peel away all the layers of his personality to expose his underlying subconscious fears. The North Koreans used such tactics during the Korean War and they were made famous in the celebrated movie, “The Manchurian Candidate.” Nowadays, the whole process has become much more sophisticated with the use of technology, designer drugs and knowledge gained through decades of interrogation by the US and its enemies. In most cases in which US military or intelligence personnel are captured, interrogated and later released, they are subsequently debriefed. During those debriefing sessions they are required to painstakingly describe interrogation methods used by the enemy and whether those methods quickly broke their willpower and encouraged them to believe that what they had done for their country was wrong. By studying the success or failure of enemy techniques US interrogators learn how to hone their own skills for dealing with suspects in their custody.

Throughout in-depth interrogations - in Guantanamo and at secret sites run by the CIA - which may involve tactics banned by the Geneva Conventions, a suspect is constantly monitored to ensure he is physically and mentally capable of undergoing extremes of interrogation. For that purpose, psychiatrists and physicians are required to be observers and advisors, thereby playing roles banned under international medical protocols. Evidence gleaned from in-depth interrogations throughout the world, even by the British in N. Ireland in the early 1970s, shows that the secret involvement of bona fide medical staff does not curtail the long term risks of serious mental health among those who have been detained and subjected to techniques such as white noise, hooding, water-boarding, physical assault and threats, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, and being subjected to extremes of heat and cold while being made to stand or sit for long periods in unusual and, ultimately, painful postures.

Those who run such interrogations argue that the overall objective is what matters, namely the recruitment of even one terrorist agent who can be inserted into the heart of a terror group like Al. Qaeda. Such an agent, they point out, will be more valuable than all the sophisticated electronics available to the CIA and NSA. And the reality is that for even one such agent to be recruited, scores of others may have to suffer irreparable mental damage.

There is little doubt that terrorist agents are critical to winning the war on terror. That was proven by British intelligence in its undercover war against the IRA for almost 30 years. A terrorist agent is more effective than electronic surveillance because his roots in an indigenous population enable him to blend into that population, whereas an outsider playing the role of an agent would be easily exposed. Terrorist organizations are constantly aware of the risks they face from electronic counter insurgency measures, such as telephone and internet taps and eye in the sky photography and management of the majority of tele-communications across the globe. They are also conscious of the use of man-to-man surveillance by intelligence agencies though that can be difficult to mount in tight communities, in mountainous terrain like Afghanistan and in volatile parts of Baghdad. In contrast, a terrorist agent can blend into his own community where the terrorists find shelter and, if he is properly trained and handled, he can be told to join a terrorist organization. Once on the inside, he is the most lethal weapon an organization like the CIA could ever have. He can alert his handlers to planned operations, identify leading terrorist operatives and reveal the terrorists’ means of communication. He can also be used to plant listening devices in terrorist hideouts and to insert similar bugs or explosive devices in weapons’ caches. The inserting of explosive devices in weapons ensures terrorists are killed the moment they remove weapons from a “dump” or when they try to fire them. For all the above reasons, the CIA will argue that “special” measures such as the project at Guantanamo are required to win the war on terror.

The success of this most secret project at Guantanamo is unknown but all indications are that it will remain active just as the controversy surrounding the camp will continue to damage the image of the US in allied, as well as in Muslim nations. The singular advantage of Guantanamo is its off-shore location and immunity from judicial interference. It also benefits from the fact that no outside body has authority to demand free access to the camp or to scrutinize what goes on within it, especially in respect of the roles played by various agencies and organizations – agencies which include the CIA and its counterparts from friendly countries across the globe and organizations which provide a range of US medical professionals and contract staff. The latter are, more often than not, former, seasoned intelligence officers or interrogators with experience in previous conflicts. Not all of tem are of U.S. origin.

One of the peculiar aspects of the Guantanamo controversy is that there has been more outrage in Europe concerning its existence than in the U.S. where the media has generally ignored the story and neglected to seriously investigate what has been going on behind the barbed wire and searchlights. Four years on, while the Bush Administration insists that Guantanamo experiment has provided vital intelligence – a claim not substantiated with facts – there is growing evidence that most of those arrested and detained in the camp have not been major players and many have had to be released over the years because they posed no threat. In fact, lawyers in Europe have been arguing that the former Gitmo suspects they represent were arrested in error, tortured and detained for as much as three years.

UN human rights investigators, after three years of talks with representatives of the Bush Administration, recently condemned the US for refusing to allow them to make open access “fact-finding” tours of the camp. Condemnation has also come from Amnesty International and other groups, adding to further damage to the US image abroad. One U.N. official complained that many inmates suffered from serious mental health problems.

Irene Khan, international secretary general of Amnesty, has gone so far as to call for exposure of what she described as a “US globalized network” designed for ill-treatment and torture of suspects. She sees Gitmo as part of a highly secret project involving similar camps across the globe, including ones already made public such as the airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan

Gareth Pierce, the most high profile lawyer in Britain, has represented several former Gitmo detainees and claims each of them was subjected to torture. One of her clients, Moazzam Begg, recently told an international conference on the plight of detainees in US custody that places like Guantanamo engendered hatred of the US and Britain. Pierce says Begg went on holiday to Afghanistan with his wife and three children, arriving at the start of the US assault on the Taliban. He immediately fled with his family to Pakistan where he was arrested and handed over to US authorities who moved him to taken to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. He was then transferred to Guantanamo. According to Begg, he was tortured at Bagram but only subjected to “tortuous” conditions at Guantanamo. He and three other British detainees were released without charge after they had spent over three years in US custody. What is interesting about the Begg case is that he has never disputed he attended two training camps in Afghanistan in 1993 and 1998, one for several days. He was also in Bosnia at the end of the conflict there in the 1990s and he financially supported what he called foreign fighters. The Afghan camps he was in were not linked to Al Qaeda. One was run by the Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban and supported the US invasion of Afghanistan. The other, based at Jalalabad in 1998 was run by Kurds training fighters for operations against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Iraq. He never fought for or with terrorists, he claims.

One of the major stories now surrounding Guantanamo – a story rarely covered by the US media – is the force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike. London lawyers from the highly reputable law firm of Allen & Ovary, which represents some of the hunger strikers, are demanding action from US medical ethics boards against doctors involved in force-feeding. The practice requires tubes to be shoved up the noses of prisoners and then down into their stomachs. It is widely deemed to be a very painful procedure. It has been confirmed that, at the outset of the force-feeding program in Guantanamo, tubes as large as 4.8mm in diameter were employed in order to speed up the process. Those tubes caused so much nausea, bleeding and pain it was decided to substitute them with tubes of 3mm diameter. Those who undertake the insertion of tubes are trained medical staff who are engaged in a practice banned under Article 5 of the 1975 Tokyo Declaration of the World Medical Association. The lawyers at Allen & Ovary in London have pointed an accusing finger at Capt. John S. Edmondson, head of the hospital at the Guantanamo base, and some senior medical figures in Britain have promised to elicit international medical support for an outright condemnation of the role of members US medical profession in force-feeding detainees.

While the Bush Administration refuses to discuss what goes on at Guantanamo, legal documents obtained by The Observer, a respected British Sunday newspaper, indicate that since Christmas the number of hunger strikers at Guantanamo has increased to 81, representing a 50% increase in a mater of weeks. The documents also show that many of the hunger strikers have been in the camp four years without being charged with an offence or allowed access to the courts. Their lawyers say they have not even been shown evidence they committed any crimes.

As a general principle, the reaction of the Bush Administration to the controversy surrounding Guantanamo is understandable yet predictable. As with all secret projects, involving techniques which potentially contravene international human rights protocols, governments tend to respond by hiding behind a cloak of national security. The government response is either that the public cannot be trusted to know what exactly is happening behind searchlights and barbed wire or the public must blindly accept that the military/intelligence infrastructure is committed to an experiment aimed at protecting the population at large. In the long term, especially in a democracy, that strategy does not work because people are just not that gullible. When the Bush Administration rounds on critics of Guantanamo, one is reminded of the reaction of Margaret Thatcher when asked about comments made by her critics. “They would say that wouldn’t they,” she remarked. So it is with the Bush administration. They would say Guantanamo and spying on ordinary Americans are projects shrouded in secrecy for the sake of national security and the protection of the population at large. Therefore the absence of palpable facts to show that those projects have successfully stopped terror and do not contravene international protocols should not matter. We should therefore unquestioningly accept the word of the president and vice-president and ignore any demands for congressional oversight or investigation.