Heather Manes
Staff Writer
No, it’s not 1984, but it seems as if George Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian regime is beginning to take root in America, the so-called land of liberty. Be careful, Big Brother is watching you.
Since the war on terror began, America has used Guantanamo Bay as a detainment camp for prisoners of war and other “enemy combatants.” Since opening the camp in 2002, controversy has tainted almost every aspect of its operations.
United States forces have taken prisoners as young as 13 and as arbitrary as taxi drivers from Middle Eastern cities and imprisoned them in Guantanamo Bay. They are taken on extremely ambiguous charges, few of which are ever disclosed. This power of elusiveness the American government has given itself in Guantanamo is treacherous — the smallest whim, or even lack thereof, could imprison an innocent citizen.
It is inside the camp, though, that the real problem resides. Prisoners are constantly mistreated and threatened for hours at a time. American forces “admit to having authorized interrogation techniques, including sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation, hooding, sensory deprivation and the use of real dogs to induce fear,” as well as additional torture techniques that include beatings, being urinated on by interrogators and sexual harassment, according to Amnesty International.
Recently, a prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay named Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld resigned from his post due to the unethical practices at Guantanamo. Vandeveld, the fourth prosecutor to have resigned at Guantanamo since 2002, was prosecuting Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan who is charged for throwing a grenade in an American Jeep that injured three in 2002.
Vandeveld was the lead prosecutor in Jawad’s case, yet he only recently found documents the Defense Department was withholding that allegedly contained confessions of other suspects for the same crime.
For six years, Jawad was held at Guantanamo for a crime to which others confessed. Almost 800 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo since 2002, and more than half have been released without any charges whatsoever.
Prisoners are brought in on mere impulses. Few probably have any real connections to terrorism, but are rather just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, what do we have to show for all our efforts patrolling the globe, ravaging homes and detaining hundreds of people? We have the conviction of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s get-away driver who had no real association with al-Qaida in the first place.
The Bush administration, though, finds no guilt in the practices at Guantanamo Bay, despite breaking the laws imposed by the Geneva Accords to protect prisoners of war from inhumane practices. Its thin excuse is that most of the prisoners have been deemed by Bush as “unlawful combatants,” not technical “prisoners of war.”
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, though, decided to translate the Geneva Accords for himself: “As I understand it, technically unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Conventions.”
The United States, though, is not the universal interpreter of treaties, and neither is Donald Rumsfeld. Just because it is “as he understands it,” this does not give America the authority to disregard the Accords whenever convenient.
“Both lawful and unlawful combatants … are entitled to humane treatment in the hands of the enemy,” according to the International Humanitarian Law.
The International Committee of Red Cross, which was adopted with the First Geneva Accords in 1863, also requires every person in enemy hands to be classified as a prisoner of war, a civilian or a member of the medical personnel.
“There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law,” the document states. “We feel that this is a satisfactory solution — not only satisfying to the mind, but also, and above all, satisfactory from the humanitarian point of view.”
The United States intervenes in conflicts around the world that involve the violation of humanitarian rights, such as the Iraqi War. Yet we turn a blind eye on our own malpractices.
Especially in the case of Guantanamo Bay, America blatantly disregards the rules and ethics of the world, establishing a dominion wherever necessary to assert its rule. Before long, if this dictatorial trend continues, George Orwell’s vision of “1984” may as well be reality.
10-02-2008