Guantanamo Mistakes and Horrors

It became the symbol of the inhumanity of the Bush administration in the War on Terror. Its cells knew torture and desperation. This marks Guantanamo’s 10th year, the detention center where Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush’s men made sure to concentrate only “the worst of the worst.” The pure distilled evil of al-Qaida pulled down the Twin Towers, exterminating 3,000 Americans and initiating a mortal fight against the United States and the West.

The camp that Obama wanted to close once and for all is still there, with its 171 detainees, who have been neither tried nor released. An eternal limbo that became law in the last few weeks after Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act. This effectively transforms the entire world into a war zone, where the United States can at any moment capture whomever American intelligence suspects of terrorism and can detain them indefinitely, without charging them or trying them, leaving them to rot for life in a camp like Guantanamo or Bagram, the American base in Afghanistan.

For almost 10 years, Guantanamo remained an “off-limits” detention center, until April, after WikiLeaks released 779 secret dockets about the last inmates in that hell. The files were part of an avalanche of documents that the American soldier Bradley Manning, now standing trial, sent to Assange’s organization, together with the video published under the title “Collateral Murder,” reports on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as U.S. diplomatic cables.

L’Espresso and la Repubblica had exclusive access to the documents with a pool of other international newspapers, such as the Washington Post, El Paìs and Le Monde. For the first time, reporters could consult the official and secret files of the American task force that manages Guantanamo (Joint Task Force GTMO), reconstruct the other stories of the hundreds of people who, before the flood of the WikiLeaks documents, were ghosts, often without a name or identity. The picture that emerged from the documents is shocking: a “metaphor for everything that has gone wrong with the Afghan war,” as the English daily newspaper The Guardian wrote.

A List of Horrors

The declarations in 2002 by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said those sent to Guantanamo would only be the most dangerous and worst terrorists in the world, those for whom there is no other solution except physical elimination, were completely unmasked by the publication of the detainees’ dockets, compiled by the same task force that had them in custody.

Among the prisoners there is no shortage of evil men, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi. The first is considered the mastermind behind Sept. 11, a graduate in engineering, very intelligent and very dangerous. The other is bin Laden’s number three. Of the 779 prisoners, only 220 are profiled as high-caliber terrorists, the rest are mid-level troops and 150 are completely innocent.

The criteria with which they were captured and sent to Guantanamo are incredible and hint at how the life of anyone could be destroyed at any moment, if it enters the sights of American intelligence, suspected of terrorism for the most improbable reasons.

Some wound up at Guantanamo because their names sounded like that of an ex-Taliban commander, as happened to Mohammad Nassim. One year after his capture, Nassim was still there, but the Task Force concluded that “he is a poor farmer and his arrest was due to a mistaken identity.” Some had no wish to make jihad, but became recruited, as the Americans write, “to repent for his sins of smoking opium and having premarital sex,” as happened to twenty-one year old Asad Ullah. He “[had] not expressed thoughts of violence or made threats toward the U.S. or its allies during interrogations or in the course of his detention” and “does not pose a future threat to the U.S. or its interests.”

There’s Ezat Khan, a woodcutter taken to Guantanamo only because he knew the trails through the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan: a harmless detainee who represents no threat to America and who was cooperative with the Task Force, but it “considers the information obtained from him and about him as not valuable or tactically exploitable.” Then there’s 89-year-old Mohammed Sadiq, sick with prostate cancer and dementia, arrested after a friend of his son found a satellite phone and a list of telephone numbers of suspect individuals. “These items could not be directly linked to the detainee, and he did not know how to operate a phone,” but Sadiq, born in 1913, was still catapulted into the hell of Guantanamo.

So it happened to Ihsan Morzai: a 29-year-old who found himself forced to fight along the Taliban, because they had captured his father. Still worse befell Abdullah Bayzanzay: he, like the other men of his village, had no wish to enlist in the army of the Taliban. But the elders feared a dreadful retaliation by the Taliban, and so they held a lottery to draw lots for the men who would be forced to enlist.

The patchwork of stories drawn by the 779 files of the detainees is, as The Guardian wrote, “a mix of the evil, the criminal and the accidental,” and shows that “Guantánamo turned out to be a bad way of gathering intelligence and even worse as a system of justice.” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/26/guantanamo-files-tale-two-prisons]

The week after the release of the detainee’s records by WikiLeaks, American forces killed Osama bin Laden, giving way to a series of speculations that the publication of that information somehow convinced the U.S. to shift itself and perhaps to advance the raid in fear that the operation was likely to go up in smoke. In the database, in fact, emerges the name of the man of one of the couriers (Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan) who transported bin Laden and the name of the locality where that sheik of terror was hidden and killed: Abbottabad. Obviously no one has commented on these speculations, but in fact, after 10 years of endless hunting, in which the leader of al-Qaida almost disappeared from the radar of the international media, bin Laden was eliminated just a week after the release of the files of the detainees at Guantanamo.

The Diplomacy of Terror

The organization of Julian Assange, however, has not only brought to light those damned to Guantanamo, but has also enabled us to recount U.S. diplomacy behind the scenes of the infamous prison. Of particular interest are the few cables in which the Americans discuss it with the Vatican. A file dated January 2002 opens a disturbing glimpse into Monsignor Luis Mariano Montemayor, the prelate in charge of the office of the Holy See for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Montemayor tells U.S. diplomacy of “a heated internal discussion” in the Vatican on the treatment of the detainees. One would expect a total rejection. Instead, according to what the Americans wrote in the cable, Montemayor said that the debate “ended in solid Vatican support, with some reservations, for the U.S.-led campaign. The file on Montemayor also reports that the prelate discussed the detention camp with a Russian interlocutor: Dmitry Shtodin, “a Russian diplomat and reputed intelligence element.” Today, Shtodin is the “Minister Counsellor” of the Russian embassy in Rome. In the discussion with Montemayor, Shtodin was struck by the prelate’s lack of tender feelings toward the prisoners. A hardness the Americans seem to trace back to the background of the Monsignore: his father was an officer of Argentine navy, and Montemayor seems to emerge from the cable as a bit nostalgic for the infamous dictatorship.

Finally, a file dated August 2005 leaves the understanding that U.S. diplomacy had in some way informed the Vatican of Guantanamo. “[The embassy] raised issue of Guantanamo and detainees during an Aug. 9 introductory call on Holy See Deputy Foreign Minister Pietro Parolin,” records the document that strangely, however, does not record any passage of the conversation between Parolin and the Americans. “Parolin indicated that he would review the issue and provide a response later. Embassy will look for further opportunities to inform key Vatican personnel on this issue and will report responses to Department promptly.” But in the database there is no trace of Parolin’s answer, none of the other documents help with interpreting this cryptic file. To dissipate forever the fog of war covering the concentration camp of Guantanamo, perhaps new raids by WikiLeaks are necessary.