COMMENTARY CIA's 'black sites'
breed more evil By Ehsan
Ahrari
"The
US has exclusive facilities across the world to
interrogate militants ... al-Tamara detention
center, eight kilometers out of Rabat in
Morocco, houses dozens of people arrested in
Pakistan, while others are kept in Egypt,
Thailand, Saudi Arabia and Qatar."
- Asia Times Online, The legacy of Nek
Mohammed, July 20,
2004
In an
era when the US media are regularly accused of
increasingly acting as the "lapdog" of the Bush
administration, the Washington Post has published
a very sensitive report about the Central
Intelligence Agency's (CIA) secret dungeons -
generally referred to inside that organization as
"black sites" - where some of the most important
al-Qaeda captives are being held.
It has
named Thailand, Afghanistan, "several democracies in
eastern Europe" (Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld's "new Europe"), and, of
course, Guantanamo Bay, as places where captives
have been held in the aftermath of the September
11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
This report underscores one of the classic
paradoxes that the Bush administration is
currently facing in its desperate attempt to win
the global "war on terror".
If one of the
crucial aspects of winning this war is to win the
hearts and minds of Muslims all over the world
(the current uphill challenge of Karen Hughes,
undersecretary of public diplomacy), then how will
the United States explain its Soviet-style gulags?
At the same time, as the "war on terror" continues
to go badly both in Iraq and Afghanistan, how is
it possible for the United States to abandon
imprisoning al-Qaeda members who are sworn to
cause harm to the United States and its citizens?
There are no simple answers to these questions.
What is certain at this point is that the
Bush administration's current policy of
imprisoning these alleged terrorists (and they are
alleged terrorists because they haven't
been granted their day in the court) and, indeed,
not even admitting that they exist, is doing grave
harm to America's image, not just in the world of
Islam, but all around the globe.
According
to preliminary reports about these prisoners,
there are about 100 (actual numbers may never be
known and, more often than not, they are likely
underestimated) being held under a two-tiered
system. About 30, the first tier, are in the
most-dangerous category and are said to be
incarcerated in Thailand and Guantanamo Bay in
Cuba.
They "exist in complete isolation
from the outside world. Kept in the dark,
sometimes in underground cells, they have no
recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA
is allowed to talk with or even see them, or
otherwise verify their well-being". The others,
about 70 prisoners in the "second tier", and are
scattered in unnamed countries in eastern Europe.
Here are some other disconcerting aspects
of the Washington Post report:
"The CIA and the White House, citing national
security concerns and the value of the program,
have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the
agency answer questions in open testimony about
the conditions under which captives are held.
Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in
the facilities, what interrogation methods are
employed with them, or how decisions are made
about whether they should be detained or for how
long."
"While the Defense Department has produced
volumes of public reports and testimony about its
detention practices and rules after the abuse
scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at
Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged
the existence of its black sites. To do so, say
officials familiar with the program, could open
the US government to legal challenges,
particularly in foreign courts, and increase the
risk of political condemnation at home and
abroad."
"The revelations of widespread prisoner abuse
in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military - which
operates under published rules and transparent
oversight of Congress - have increased concern
among lawmakers, foreign governments and human
rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those
concerns escalated last month, when Vice President
Cheney and CIA Director Porter J Goss asked
Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation
already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar
cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in
US custody."
It is understandable that, in
the immediate aftermath of the September 11
attacks, those "black sites" were hurriedly
established. What is unfathomable is why they were
left intact for the four years since then. A
partial understanding may be developed by taking a
broad overview of what transpired in this
so-called "war on terror".
The Bush
administration never finished the task of
eradicating al-Qaeda in 2001. Its decision to jump
to Iraq before the job of fighting terrorism was
done in Afghanistan left no breathing spell to
revisit the proposition of doing away with those
secret dungeons. When the Iraqi insurgency became
deadly, the necessity of gaining access to crucial
and timely intelligence became the chief driving
force. During this time, the hard-nosed
perspectives of Cheney and Rumsfeld to break the
back of the Iraqi insurgency remained as the
overall justification to maintain those secret
facilities.
According to the Washington
Post, there is now a debate taking place within
the CIA "about the legality, morality and
practicality of holding even unrepentant
terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps
for the duration of their lives". Some former
senior CIA insiders reported there never was a
grand strategy about dealing with those secret
prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how
you get to a situation where you pick people up,
send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What
are we going to do with them afterwards'?"
The most nagging question about this whole
issue is why any foreign government agreed to
violate the Geneva Convention against torture.
Thailand, one of the countries named in the
Washington Post report, has already vehemently
denied any participation, but few even in East
Asia believe the Thai government.
To be
fair to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he publicly
asked to take charge of Afghan prisoners in US
custody during his last visit to Washington.
However, President George W Bush flatly denied his
request. In Egypt and Jordan, torture had been a
sine qua non of their brutal regimes. These
newly converted democracies were not given a good
lesson in democracy by the United States when it
asked them to host those dungeons.
How
will this episode play in the Bush
administration's campaign to "win the hearts and
minds of Muslims"? It seems that no one in
Washington is paying any attention to linkages
between such policies and the US image in the
Muslim world. How much longer should the good name
of the United States be soiled before someone in
Washington has the guts to say "enough"! It seems
that the rhetoric of fear has taken over the good
judgment of almost all public officials. US
legislators are primarily driven by fear of being
labeled by the right wing as "going soft" on
terrorism and then not getting reelected.
Fighting terrorism, with no regard to
morality or humanity, tends to blur the
distinction between those who blatantly perpetrate
nefarious acts of terrorism and those who claim to
fight terrorism. If that distinction is purposely
blurred by those whose job it is to promote
international law and human rights, then the
question is, who will uphold the universal
principles of justice and humanity?
The
Muslim world looks at the entire effort to win
their hearts and minds as nothing short of the
newest scam from Washington. They know the real
battle about winning terrorism will be fought, not
in the trenches of Afghanistan and the dark alleys
of Iraq, but through such mundane chores as
promotion of civil societies inside their polities
and establishing schools that would prepare young
Muslims to tackle the complicated problems of a
highly globalized world, to name a few.
Muslim youngsters want to declare jihad,
not against some imaginary "infidel" who lives in
New York or London, but against obscurantism,
illiteracy and economic backwardness inside their
own borders. Their biggest enemy is the poverty
and economic underdevelopment that has been
keeping anachronistic, brutal and inept autocratic
regimes in power. The United States has to refocus
its attention from counterterrorism to
anti-terrorism by developing multifaceted
policies. In the absence of such policies, it is
only a matter of time before an even nastier,
meaner and more brutal generation of terrorists
takes over the religious discourse as well as the
street in Muslim countries.
There appears
to be a serious disconnect between what the United
States should do to fight and win the global "war
on terror" and what it is currently doing.
The greatest threat to the United States
does not come from the "first tier" detainees of
those black dungeons or even from Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, often described as an Osama bin Laden
associate. Rather, it is the young generation that
is coming up, armed with half-baked notions of
what jihad is. That young generation has no luxury
of going to decent schools, playing with high-tech
toys or expecting surprise gifts from Santa Claus
in December. That generation is growing up in the
condemned cold shacks of Somalia, the
earthquake-stricken gaping holes in
Pakistan-administered Kashmir or even in the
Pankisi Gorge of Georgia, being taught to hate the
US and the West for everything that they don't
have.
Imagine the agony and anger of the
youth in Aceh, Indonesia, or in
Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where 75,000 people
are reported to have perished in last month's
earthquake. That is where the best efforts and
precious capital of the civilized world must be
invested to improve the lot of Muslims. Much
energy is needed to be spent in the dilapidated
environs of the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia.
That is where the next battle of the "war on
terror" will be fought. How many more black sites
will - or can - the United States build to
incarcerate the next generation?
Ehsan Ahrari is an independent
strategic analyst based in Alexandria, VA, US. His
columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. He
is also a regular contributor to the Global Beat
Syndicate. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.
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