June 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Am I Human or Not? Guantánamo Detention Undermines Human Rights Worldwide

From the report "Undermining Security: Violations of Human Dignity, the Rule of Law, and the National Security Strategy in 'War on Terror' Detentions," by Amnesty International. For the full version of the report, with notes, visit www.amnesty.org.

"The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere" - United States National Security Strategy, September 2002

In March 2003, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "States which demonstrate a high degree of respect for human rights are likeliest to contribute to international security and well-being." Amnesty International agrees. The road to security does not bypass human rights. Rather, respect for human rights should be a central plank of any government's security strategy. Contempt for internationally agreed human rights principles breeds resentment and fuels divisions within and among countries.

A legal brief signed by 175 British parliamentarians and filed in the US Supreme Court in January 2004 in support of justice for the hundreds of detainees in US custody in Guantánamo Bay offers "a caution that in times of distress the shield of military necessity and national security must not be used to protect government institutions from close scrutiny and accountability."

Taken at face value, the US's National Security Strategy commits the United States to an approach that has human rights at its core. For example, it emphasizes that the path to a safer world must include "respect for human dignity." In doing so it echoes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in 1948 in response to years of "disregard and contempt for human rights" and which has at its heart a vision of a world in which the dignity of every human being is respected.

The US National Security Strategy devotes an entire chapter to promising that the US will "stand firmly for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity," including "the rule of law" and "limits on the absolute power of the state."

Instead, the US has built a prison camp at its military base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and filled it with hundreds of detainees from around the world. An unknown number of other people are held in undisclosed locations elsewhere - not even the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only international organization which has been able to visit the Guantánamo detainees, knows where these detainees are held or has access to them. With many of the detainees now well into their third year held in tiny cells for up to 24 hours a day without any legal process, it seems that the current US administration views human dignity and the rule of law as far from non-negotiable when it comes to national security.

The first prisoners, transferred from Afghanistan on 20-hour flights in conditions of sensory deprivation and heavy use of restraints, arrived in Guantánamo Bay on January11, 2002. A photograph released by the Pentagon at this time has become an icon of unacceptable US exceptionalism. It shows detainees in orange jumpsuits, kneeling before US soldiers, shackled, handcuffed, and wearing blacked-out goggles over their eyes and masks over their mouths and noses.

For some, the transfer to Cuba followed weeks of harsh treatment in US custody elsewhere. Mohammed Ismail Agha was a "slight, illiterate village boy of 13" when he was taken into US custody in Afghanistan in late 2002 and held in Bagram Air Base for six weeks. He was nevertheless considered to be a "threat to US security" and was subsequently held in US custody without charge or trial for more than a year, including at Guantánamo Bay. He was released back to Afghanistan in late January 2004 with two other child detainees following an official determination that they "no longer posed a threat to our nation."

Mohammed Ismail Agha has alleged that he was held in solitary confinement in Bagram and subjected to what have become known as "stress and duress techniques." He has said: "They were interrogating me every day and in the first three or four days giving just a little food, and giving punishment." He said "It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up. When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn't bear it anymore and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more." His allegations echo what other former detainees held by the US military in Afghanistan have said.

Wazir Mohammad, an Afghan taxi driver, was released from Guantánamo Bay in November 2003, and spoke to Amnesty International in Kabul in late February 2004. During the interview, he recalled his detention in US custody in Afghanistan in April and May 2002 prior to his transfer to Guantánamo. He said that he was held in a cell on his own in Bagram Air Base for 45 days, shackled and handcuffed for the first week. Every day for the 45 days he was told he would be released.

Wazir Mohammad was not released, however, but transferred from Bagram to Kandahar Air Base. He said that during the transfer he was hooded and handcuffed, and that the restraints were so tight that it cut the blood flow to his hands. In Kandahar, he was again interrogated once for about an hour. He said that he was forced to crawl on his knees from his cell to the interrogation room, a crawl of about 10 minutes.

During his whole time in Bagram and Kandahar, Wazir Mohammad was held incommunicado. He was given no opportunity to challenge the lawfulness of his detention. He had no lawyer, no access to his family, and was not brought before any court, including the "competent tribunal" envisaged by the Geneva Conventions to determine prisoner status in time of war. He never met a delegate from the International Committee of the Red Cross either. He was then put on a plane to Guantánamo Bay. He said that he was hooded and handcuffed for the 22-hour flight. When asked about toilet facilities during the flight, he refused to elaborate, saying that he could not talk of some of the things that happened on the plane. Upon arrival at Guantánamo, Wazir Mohammad said that he and his fellow detainees were taken off the plane "like cargo, not people." Where was the US National Security Strategy's commitment to human dignity then? How does cruel and degrading treatment of detainees promote national security?

The administration's rejection of judicial review of the detentions likewise contradicts the Security Strategy's guarantee of "limits on the absolute power of the state." In refuting the need for judicial intervention, the executive recently announced that it would institute a process of annual executive review of detentions. The administration has also pointed to the multi-step screening process it says it uses to determine if the detention of any particular individual is necessary.

The multi-level detention process trumpeted by the administration has not prevented the prolonged detention of people such as Wazir Mohammad who appear simply to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is one of 146 detainees to have been transferred from Guantánamo to date, the vast majority released upon arrival in their home countries. These were detainees who had been labeled by the US President and his administration as "bad people," "killers," and "terrorists."

Three of the UK detainees claim to have been subjected to more than 200 interrogations each during their time in US custody, without access to any court, to legal counsel, or to relatives. The three released UK prisoners have recalled how they made false confessions after being put in isolation cells and repeatedly interrogated. Their allegations have fuelled concern not only that detainees may face trial by military commission on the basis of coerced statements, but also more generally that the Guantánamo regime is as likely to produce bad intelligence as good, hardly a constructive strategy for the promotion of national security.

The signal sent by the Guantánamo regime, many former diplomats have pointed out in a brief urging the US Supreme Court to find that the US courts have jusrisdiction over the Guantánamo detainees, "puts United States citizens abroad - as well as those of other nations - at risk because it can be invoked in support of other countries' practices of arbitrary detention..." Other states have already used the United States' example to justify their own abuses. For example, explaining the detention of militants without trial, Malaysia's law minister said that the practice was "just like the process in Guantánamo Bay." He emphasised that he "put the equation with Guantánamo Bay just to make it graphic to you that this is not simply a Malaysian style of doing things."

The International Commission of Jurists, a non-governmental organization whose membership is composed of 60 eminent jurists who are representatives of the different legal systems of the world, has said that its own work to promote the rule of law in the international community is undermined by the USA's creation of the legal black hole at Guantánamo.

Harold Hongju Koh, Assistant Secretary of State for human rights under the Clinton administration, has suggested that since 11 September 2001, "freedom from fear has become the obsessive watchword of US human rights policy." He describes the creation of "extralegal zones" such as Guantánamo Bay and "extralegal persons" such as "enemy combatants" as two of the central elements of this flawed approach. Acting above the law in this way runs directly counter to the vision of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which holds that "it is essential...that human rights should be protected by the rule of law."

Two years before the adoption of the Universal Declaration, the US Supreme Court wrote: "All of the mobilization and all of the war effort will have been in vain if, when all is finished, we discover that in the process we have destroyed the very freedoms for which we fought."

In a poem written to his family from Guantánamo Bay in 2002, Afghan national Wazir Mohammad wrote, "No one's asked me am I human or not."

The US administration would do well to consider his words. They say in another way what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, namely that people, including all detainees in all situations, are human beings first and foremost. The Declaration holds that "recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. There is no reason to abandon the wisdom and vision of the Universal Declaration now.

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