The Bleaker Truth of Anti-Americanism: Torture, Rendition, and Guantánamo

[unhappycamper]

The Bleaker Truth of Anti-Americanism: Torture, Rendition, and Guantánamo
by Andy Worthington
Published on Saturday, September 11, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

On the 9th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001 that prompted the launch of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” the closure of Guantánamo and calls for accountability for those who instigated torture and established secret prisons and imprisonment without charge or trial remain as important as ever.

This is especially true because, on this particular anniversary, the crimes and injustices initiated by the Bush administration are, arguably, less in the public eye than at any time in the last six years. In 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal first alerted US citizens to a culture of torture and abuse that was sanctioned at the highest levels of government (however much the administration tried to brush it off as the work of “a few bad apples”), the US Supreme Court intervened, in Rasul v. Bush, to raise awareness of the lawless plight of the prisoners at Guantánamo by granting them habeas corpus rights, allowing lawyers to visit the men and to begin to puncture the veil of secrecy in which Guantánamo had been shrouded for the first two and a half years of its existence.

From then until the end of Bush’s presidency, the administration and Congress did their best to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling, with Congress reiterating its support for the President’s malign policies through the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, both of which purported to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights. Nevertheless, awareness of the injustice of Guantánamo grew steadily. During his second term, President Bush was obliged to pull back from various excesses, effectively closing his global network of secret prisons in September 2006, when he moved 14 “high-value detainees” from secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo, after the Supreme Court had forcefully inserted the Geneva Conventions’ obligation to treat prisoners humanely into his calculations in another important ruling in June 2006, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

In Boumediene v. Bush, a third ruling in June 2008, the Supreme Court reiterated that the Guantánamo prisoners had habeas corpus rights, ruling that the legislation passed by Congress that purported to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights was unconstitutional, and paving the way for a succession of habeas petitions to reach the US courts — 54 so far, of which 38 have been won by the prisoners.

When Barack Obama came to power, there was a sudden wave of interest in Guantánamo, and in President Bush’s legacy of torture and secret detention, but nine years on from 9/11, eight years and eight months since Guantánamo opened, and 20 months into Obama’s presidency, it is clear that, far from closing Guantánamo, as he promised in an executive order on his second day in office, President Obama now oversees a culture of indifference with regard to the fate of the Guantánamo prisoners, those held in the US prison at Bagram airbase, and others subjected to the CIA’s program of “extraordinary rendition” and secret prisons, many of whom are still unaccounted for.