Festering wounds

With President Barack Obama now in his second term, the Bush era may be receding into the past, but its poisonous legacy lives on. In recent days, serious unrest erupted at Guantanamo camp, where 166 detainees are still held more than 11 years after 9/11. To quell a riot, the camp authorities resorted to the use of rubber bullets, wounding several detainees. Guards, too, incurred injuries in the clashes.

Held for more than a decade, without charges and trial, the remaining prisoners are getting desperate. A growing number, which has risen from 43 to 52 in recent days according to official figures, have gone on hunger strike to gain their freedom. Half the detainees, many of them Yemenis, were in fact cleared for release several years ago after the US authorities found nothing to suggest they posed a threat. Yet, despite President Obama's pledge to close down the camp, Guantanamo remains a no-go area where international rules of democracy and human rights don't seem to apply.

The Constitution Project, a non-partisan think tank, has just released a comprehensive 577-page report, confirming the "indisputable" use of torture by the United States in the "war on terror," which it said was condoned at the highest level of the Bush administration. The report urges the current US government to close down Guantanamo by the end of 2014, when all troops have pulled out of Afghanistan.

Another survey conducted by the Open Society Justice Initiative, published in February, had also confirmed widespread use of torture. Bush era officials used euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation techniques" to hide what was plainly, according to international standards, unacceptable abuse. In fact, the Constitution Project measured the US against its own standards, pointing out that Washington had condemned the methods as torture when used by other nations. The task force also stated that little information of value had been obtained through abuse, contradicting official claims that harsh methods were sometimes necessary to acquire critical intelligence that could save lives.

Both reports also mention the role played by foreign governments, who share the blame in the "extraordinary rendition" of alleged suspects. This may not be news -- these activities have been revealed before. But hopefully, having these allegations confirmed after extensive and detailed ground research will force a new debate about the actions of European Union members like the UK, Sweden, Italy and Germany, identified as prominent players together with Canada, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Jordan, or the secret prisons that were said to have been set up in Poland, Lithuania and Romania.

The Constitution Project suggests that some detainees were sent to Libya for interrogation mainly to curry favor with Gaddafi, before being later used against his regime as the tide turned across the Middle East. The report of the Open Society Justice Initiative, titled “Globalizing Torture,” has an even more comprehensive list of countries that cooperated with the US, naming 54 that have in one way or another been involved in the illegal detention, transfer and abuse of detainees. Turkey figures on the list.

An account published in The New York Times by one of the Guantanamo hunger strikers, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni aged 35 and held for over a decade, describes the pain and indignity of being force fed twice a day through a tube inserted into his nose. The widespread abuses committed in the name of the "war on terror" have not just affected the reputation of the US and its allies: They have also undermined the cause of democracy and human rights worldwide, which is why revealing the extent of the abuse and addressing issues like Guantanamo, which continue to fester, is more important than ever.