Guantanamo: America's concentration camp

Below are some excerpts from an interview with  Colonel Morris Davis who was the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo for a period.  It is very interesting and you can read more of it and check out some reading material at Andy Worthington's site here.

“The Government’s Narrative Was a Lie”
By Morris Davis, Der Spiegel, May 2, 2011

"There clearly were — and there clearly still are — some incredibly bad men held in detention at Guantánamo. But it was equally clear that a significant number were simply teenagers, old men, or foreigners captured walking around in Afghanistan with a Casio watch like the ones that al-Qaida handed out in its Afghan training camps — people who did not come close to matching the label of “the worst of the worst.” Colonel Morris Davis

Separating Intelligence from Law Enforcement
I know a lot of people think the military waterboarded detainees at Guantánamo — and to this day they probably think that it is still happening — but that was not the case and to my knowledge no one was ever waterboarded at Guantánamo. We had what I believe was complete access to information, particularly CIA information. I actually had a harder time getting information from my own colleagues in the Defense Department for some reason. And we were briefed on interrogation techniques that were used by the people who conducted the interrogations.

We had spent months assessing the information available on the high-value detainees and what parts of it we thought we could use in court. Because of the treatment they received in CIA custody and because of concern about exposing CIA personnel or the roles other countries had played, we wanted to separate the intelligence effort from the law enforcement effort to the extent we could.

In early 2007, we created so-called clean-teams made up of military and civilian law enforcement personnel that would try to interview each of the high-value detainees. It was an opportunity to explain to each detainee that he was in a new place, with new people, and under new rules. If the detainee wanted to talk, fine, but it was the detainee’s choice. The sessions I observed looked like a couple of people sitting around a table having a casual conversation. At times there were smiles and laughter.

There was nothing coercive that I saw in those sessions, but the question remains whether after you cross the line can you ever walk it back to the right side. Once you ring the torture bell can you ever un-ring it? We did not know then if the clean-team effort would produce anything useful or if judges would permit it in court, but we thought we had nothing to lose if we gave it a try. That was more than four years ago and we still do not know the answer.

“We Tortured Qahtani”

One case where torture clearly took place at Guantánamo is the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man I believe was supposed to be the real 20th hijacker on 9/11. It was the dirtiest of the cases prior to the arrival of the high-value detainees and I was working on it personally. Once the personnel at Guantánamo realized the detainee they had in custody was the same person that had been turned away at the airport in Orlando, Florida while Mohammed Atta was waiting, they turned up the pressure to get information out of him.

Secretary Rumsfeld approved a harsh interrogation plan and over a period of weeks, Qahtani was separated from the other detainees, held in isolation in the brig, subjected to extreme temperatures, constant loud music, sleep deprivation, forced to stand nude in front of females, restrained in stress positions, threatened with rendition to a country where he would be tortured, threats to his family, and on and on. In an interview published in the Washington Post in January 2009 in the final days of the Bush administration, Ms. Crawford explained why she never sent the Qahtani case to trial. She said: “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”

He is still at Guantánamo. The Obama administration has completely ignored its obligation under domestic and international law to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture. Apparently we are looking forward and pretending nothing bad happened in our past.

The final moment for me was in October 2007. My dispute with General Hartmann over torture and evidence and meddling with the process reached Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England, and he issued an order that said my chain of command was Hartmann and then Jim Haynes. Hartmann did not believe we tortured — remember, President Bush said we didn’t — and Haynes had given legal approval for torture, the memo Secretary Rumsfeld signed. I read the order, saw who had command authority over me, and I resigned.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.