Torture Island. posted by Richard Seymour

Michael Winterbottom's award-winning film, The Road to Guantanamo, is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm. You may remember that the film's subjects and some of the actors were arrested as they returned from a film festival, detained and subject to some bizarre treatment. The film, a docu-drama weaving narrative with real-life footage, focuses on the plight of the Tipton Three, three young Muslim men who were kidnapped by US forces in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay. These men were not Taliban fighters, members of Al Qaeda or any other 'radical' group, as both the US and UK governments have been obliged to concede through clenched teeth. They were engaged in aid projects in Afghanistan: many white, non-Muslim people were also engaged in such charitable enterprises and did not end up in Guantanamo as a result. The three men have released a 150 page account of their experience of torture and beatings in Guantanamo. What is notable about their account, as The Observer notes, is that it is very similar to those given by other released 'detainees'. And of course it chimes with much of the evidence already obtained by some media sources. How to account for this? How to rubbish these men? How to destroy the very idea that these prisoners are human so that anything they say if they ever are set free is suspicious in advance?

Well, according to Donald Rumsfeld:

They're taught to lie, they're taught to allege that they have been tortured, and that's part of the [terrorist] training that they received. We know that torture is not occurring there. We know that for a fact… The reality is that the terrorists have media committees. They are getting very clever at manipulating the media in the United States and in the capitals of the world. They know for a fact they can't win a single battle on the battlefields in the Middle East. They know the only place they can win a battle is in the capitol in Washington, D.C. by having the United States lose its will, so they consciously manipulate the media here to achieve their ends, and they're very good at it.

Outrageous and extravagant lies of course, yet entirely predictable from the sociopaths who rule the world. As this excellent and well-sourced article by Dahr Jamail at Tom Dispatch shows, torture in Guantanamo is not merely as ubiquitous as elsewhere in the US's global gulag, but also extreme. It ranges from sexual humiliation to extreme neglect, to having prisoners chained hand and foot to the floor, to beatings. And as Seymour Hersh has shown, this is a matter of policy.

How could it be otherwise? The whole purpose of having extra-legal prison camps in obscure and difficult to reach locations is to ensure that the people there can be treated in whatever way the US government decides to allow in some secrecy. That's why the former Guantanamo commander responsible for devising 'interrogation' techniques in Abu Ghraib is refusing to testify about what he did. That's why they're keeping individuals there that they know to be innocent, which we are only now aware of because the Pentagon has kept the lists of people imprisoned there secret for years. That's why they must deny prisoners access to US Courts, the legal kind, the ones where you have to allow the accused to have representation and know what the evidence is, and where there must be a charge of some kind. The madness of being imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and beaten, all the while knowing that it makes no difference whether one is guilty or not, whether one gives this answer or that, that one is there for the sole crime of being a Muslim in the wrong place at the wrong time, has driven some prisoners to attempt suicide, while others still have spent long evenings literally ripping their own hair out before falling unconscious on the cold floor. The three men from Tipton, now back in their own homes, are experiencing something close to breakdown.

The Masters of Humanity shrug. Hunger strike? Just a little diet. Torture allegations? A media exercise. Suicide attempt? Just an attempt to pluck liberal heart-strings. Pissing on the Quran? Accident - the Marine in question was trying to piss on a prisoner. Pain, sexual humiliation, starvation, strappado, torture postures, beatings? It's not torture unless the pain is "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death". The ruling class just does not understand why the rest of us are such sissies.