As we explore war crimes against Vladimir Putin, Russian military leaders and civilians charged with integrating kidnapped Ukrainian children into Russian families, we gloss over our own war crime missteps. We’ve done it many times before, but most recently when the United States crossed the line against the Conventions Against Torture (a treaty to which we are not a signatory), our behavior is best exemplified by this century’s Iraq War and various other conflicts mostly involving the Middle East and Islamic Asia. We called our methods “enhanced interrogation,” justified as former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld labeled them, “what has been charged so far is abuse… technically different from torture.” Exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation, water boarding, urinating on the Qur’an, rough physical handling that often-included punching and hitting. White House lawyers during the G.W. Bush administration twisted legal language to exonerate what was clearly torture.
We purposely housed what we considered truly dangerous Muslim extremists, and many were very dangerous for sure, outside of the territorial United States, presumably a place unprotected by US constitutional rights: a naval base on Cuban soil that we occupied under a long-standing treaty - the detention center at Guantanamo Bay (“Gitmo”). It was the United States housing non-US citizens as enemy combatants outside our borders. Like the Eastern European “black ops” detention many claimed was often standard CIA procedure. Most have been released, some were people in the “wrong place at the wrong time” but otherwise innocent. Others were terrorists with American blood on their hands, most associated with the 9/11/2001 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They were indefinitely detained, many without formal charges.
Gitmo was opened in 2002… and despite repeated political pledges to close the facility, continues to operate to this very day. After decades, an official investigator from the United Nations was finally allowed to visit those remaining prisoners. As reported by Edith M Lederer, writing for the July 8th Associated Press: “U.N. investigator Fionnuala Ní Aoláin met with the last 30 men at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, seen in 2006. She says all of the 780 Muslims who were detained, most without cause, were traumatized for life… At the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the aging men known by their serial numbers arrived at the meeting shackled. Every single one told the visitor — who was the first independent person many had talked to in 20 years: ‘You came too late.’…
“For the first time since the facility opened in 2002, a U.S. president had allowed a United Nations independent investigator, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, to visit… She said in an interview with the Associated Press that it’s true she’d arrived too late, because 780 Muslim men were detained there after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, and today just 30 remain.
“The U.N. had tried for many years to send an independent investigator, but was turned down by the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump… Ní Aoláin praised President Biden’s administration for allowing ‘critical voices’ into the facility. And she expressed hope other governments that have barred U.N. special investigators will follow Biden’s example.
“The Belfast-born law professor said she believes the ‘high-value’ and ‘non-high-value’ detainees she met with — the Biden administration gave her free rein to talk to anyone — all “recognized the importance of sitting in a room” with her… ‘But I think there was a shared understanding that at this point, with only 30 of them left, while I can make recommendations and they will hopefully substantially change the day-to-day experience of these men, the vast majority of their lives was lived in a context where people like myself and the U.N. had no influence,’ she said.
“Ní Aoláin, who teaches at the University of Minnesota and Queens University in Belfast, said she’d visited many high-security prisons in her six years as a U.N. human rights investigator, including some built for those convicted of terrorism and serious related offenses… But ‘there is really no population on Earth like this population that came to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the circumstances in which they came, rendered across borders,’ she said.
“In a report issued June 26, Ní Aoláin said even though the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, were ‘crimes against humanity,’ the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo was unjustified. The vast majority were taken there without cause and had no relationship to the terrorist attacks, she wrote, adding that all of the men still alive suffer from psychological and physical trauma.
“The Biden administration, which has said it wants to close the Guantanamo detention center, said in a statement attached to the report that Ní Aoláin’s findings ‘are solely her own,’ and that ‘the United States disagrees in significant respects with many factual and legal assertions’ but would carefully review her recommendations.
“In her interview with the AP last week, Ní Aoláin discussed on a personal level what she saw there… She said all U.S. personnel are required to address detainees by their internment serial numbers, not their names, which she called ‘dehumanizing.’… Ní Aoláin said she was especially concerned about three detainees who have not been charged and ‘live in a complete legal limbo,’ which is ‘completely inconsistent with international law.’.. Of the others, 16 have been cleared to leave but haven’t found a country willing to take them, and 11 still have cases pending before U.S. military commissions.
“When the detainees were brought to meet her, they were shackled, which she said is not standard procedure even for those convicted of terrorism. Under international law, she said, people cannot be shackled except for imperative security reasons, and in her view it should be used at Guantanamo only as a last resort in exceptional circumstances… But they still talked — about the scant contacts with their families, their many health problems, the psychological and physical scars of the torture and abuse they experienced, and their hopes of leaving and reuniting with loved ones.”
All wars have potential war crimes. Many questioned the US saturation bombing of Dresden, Germany or the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in WWII. Mostly civilian targets… but how many lives were saved by accelerating an eventual surrender and end to the war? But detaining terrorists, often not members of any military protected under the Geneva Convention, under conditions that are difficult to call anything but illegal torture and unsupportable incarceration without trial, we need to ask: Who are we? What does America stand for? Why are we so hated by so many all over the world? And how do we take a moral high ground when we have been so violative of human rights before?
I’m Peter Dekom, and as we cling to what’s left of our democracy, we cannot continue as a symbol of freedom and human rights until we examine our own practices and accept some serious level of accountability.
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