Descent Into Chaos (58 page)

In order to enlist other countries in the war on terrorism, the United States was prepared to reject human rights concerns and often accepted the lies told by regimes. Thus Washington’s desire to enlist China to fight terrorism gave Beijing the freedom to pursue a harsh campaign against its political adversaries in the province of Xinjiang. Underground nationalist groups among the largely Muslim Uighur population had been demanding greater autonomy and even independence from China for several decades. Although there was minimal Islamic extremism among the Uighurs, China executed twenty-five Uighurs for political activity in 2001 and accused the exiled East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) of being linked to al Qaeda. China claimed, without offering sufficient evidence, that the several dozen Uighurs who had fought with the Taliban all belonged to ETIM.

Despite the lack of evidence, in August 2002 the United States declared the ETIM a terrorist organization. Washington had carried out the move to enlist Chinese support at the UN Security Council for its invasion of Iraq. However, the Chinese were to use the U.S. declaration as justification for a stepped-up crackdown on the practice of Islam in western China.
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A total of twelve Uighurs captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan were held at Guantánamo. Five were eventually considered innocent, and the United States tried to persuade a third country to give them political asylum, fearing that if they were returned to China they would be executed. They were released in 2006 to a UN-run compound in Albania. American lawyers defending seven other Uighurs filed suit, demanding that these prisoners also be freed, as they were innocent.
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Yet none of these extraordinary systems of detention, interrogation, and torture could prepare the world for the monstrosity that the Americans created in Guantánamo. “When the prisoners arrived in Camp X-Ray, they were put in open-air cages like animals in a zoo,” said a Western official who knows the prison well. “It was very hot, they did not know where they were, they did not know their legal status or what would happen to them, and there was no privacy, even when going to the toilet,” the official added. For months at a time prisoners were not even allowed to speak to one another. “If you want a definition of this place, you don’t have the right to have rights,” Nizar Sassi, a French prisoner, wrote to his family in August 2002.
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Eventually Guantánamo was to hold more than six hundred prisoners of forty nationalities speaking eighteen different languages.

Guantánamo undermined several clauses of the U.S. Constitution—the rule of law and due legal process, the commitment to international humanitarian law, the non-use of torture, and the limits placed upon presidential power. Guantánamo was not just a detention center but a permanent intelligence-gathering and interrogation laboratory where its American jailers could experiment in new ways to increase psychological pressure, abuse, and isolation of the prisoners.

After the ICRC began to visit Guantánamo in January 2002, it wrote a series of confidential reports to the U.S. government demanding improvements in living conditions and methods of interrogation and that prisoners be informed where they were and offered a legal process. In May 2004, after a series of leaks of confidential ICRC reports to the U.S. government, the ICRC publicly stated its main concern: “We’re dealing here with a broader pattern and a system, as opposed to individual acts.”
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By the summer of 2002, fifty-three inmates were receiving mental health counseling, and in the next twelve months there were thirty-two suicide attempts by twenty-one captives. Abdul Razzaq, a Pakistani in an acute stage of depression, tried to kill himself four times.

In 2003 conditions worsened at Guantánamo. There was a new camp commandant, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was later to become notorious in Iraq when he was sent to take command of the Abu Ghraib prison. Miller made the guards part of the interrogation process, with the task of softening up the prisoners before they were questioned. After the new methods were put into force, depression and suicide bids among the prisoners increased.

Ultimately a handful of dedicated lawyers were responsible for pushing the Guantánamo cases to the U.S. Supreme Court. The story of British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who headed the small New Orleans-based Justice in Exile, is a saga of persistence, determination, and belief in the rule of law. After losing several cases in the lower courts in Washington, lawyers formed a coalition to take their writs to the Supreme Court. A major shift in public and judicial concern occurred in April 2004 after American TV showed the first pictures of the abuse of prisoners by guards at Abu Ghraib.
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Conditions at Guantánamo continued to worsen. In July 2005, fifty-two prisoners went on a hunger strike, refusing all food. By September the number rose to two hundred, and U.S. guards began to force-feed the prisoners. In June 2006, three prisoners—two Saudis and a Yemeni— committed suicide by hanging themselves with their bedsheets. Their deaths sparked outrage in the Muslim world and among European governments, who called for the closure of Guantánamo. In October 2005 an amendment passed by the Senate demanded that the U.S. military and the CIA conform to standards for interrogation that adhered to the GC. The senator and later presidential candidate John McCain gave a blunt warning to the American people on the implications of continuing to torture prisoners: “The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps our war effort. In my experience the abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear—whether it is true or false. . . . This is a war of ideas. . . . Prisoner abuses exact a terrible toll on us in this war of ideas.”
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However, diehard Republicans waged a fierce rearguard action, criticizing the UN and the ICRC. A Senate Republican committee demanded that the United States reconsider its funding for the organization, saying the ICRC had “lost its way” and was willfully undermining the U.S. war on terrorism.
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Cherif Bassiouni, an Egyptian appointed as a UN monitor for human rights in Afghanistan, issued a report in April 2005 accusing U.S. forces and contractors of “abusive practices, including torture.” Under pressure from Washington, the UN first sacked Bassiouni and then declared his job redundant. Reports of abuse and torture by U.S. forces had visibly increased anti-Americanism in the Muslim world and Europe. In the summer of 2005, reports that guards at Guantánamo had flushed copies of the Koran down the toilets led to widespread demonstrations across the Muslim world, including in Afghanistan, where seventeen lives were lost in riots.

Under enormous pressure, the U.S. Supreme Court finally reacted, ruling on June 28, 2006, that fourteen Guantánamo detainees could file writs in U.S. courts and thereby challenge their indefinite detention. It was a landmark decision, although it had taken nearly two and a half years for the Court to pass the judgment. “A state of war is not a blank check for the President,” said the Court ruling.
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In September, Bush admitted the existence of the CIA’s black sites and renditions and said that fourteen prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been transferred to Guantánamo and would face trial. Nine of the fourteen had been picked up in Pakistan. However, the fate of at least thirty-eight prisoners and possibly as many as sixty was still unknown, and it was presumed they remained in secret detention.
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The U.S. military now admitted for the first time that twenty-seven prisoners had died in detention in Iraq and Afghanistan, out of an estimated fifty thousand detainees held in both countries since 9 /11. The Pentagon admitted to the deaths of seven prisoners in Afghanistan, although human rights groups put the number at eight. No senior U.S. officer was ever held accountable for any of the deaths.
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In the meantime, hundreds of prisoners from Guantánamo who had been falsely accused were freed.

The Bush administration now attempted to undermine the Supreme Court judgment by pushing through Congress a new bill to legalize the military tribunals the Court had found unconstitutional. Another polarizing debate took place in Congress. Former secretary of state Colin Powell weighed in for the first time: “If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions, whether we believe it or not, people are now starting to question whether we are following our own high standards,” he said in his first criticism of the administration he had once served.
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Congress passed the new law just a few weeks before the critical November 2006 congressional elections, in which the Republicans were heavily defeated. The new law allowed the prosecution of terrorist suspects for war crimes by special military commissions but would limit suspects’ rights in the trials, including restricting their ability to examine the evidence against them. (No decent legal system would deny an individual the right to see the evidence against him.) The law also granted legal protection to CIA interrogators.

By now there was a worldwide backlash against renditions and the ease with which the CIA was able to overturn state laws and kidnap anyone, anywhere. In late 2005 an Italian judge filed a case accusing twenty-six CIA officers of kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian cleric who had disappeared in Milan in February 2003. In Sweden a parliamentary ombudsman criticized Swedish security services for collaborating with the CIA in handing over two Egyptian suspects in 2001. In Germany a judge questioned the kidnapping of Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, by the CIA in Macedonia in 2003.
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In February 2007, Canada’s Supreme Court struck down the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects.

European opposition parties accused their governments of helping the CIA render prisoners. In a report prepared for the Council of Europe in June 2006, fourteen European nations were named as facilitating the CIA in carrying out renditions. Air traffic control logs showed that the CIA had secret transfer points for renditions in Szymany, Poland, and Timisoara, Romania, while other countries had provided logistics, backup, and refueling stops for CIA aircraft. Human Rights Watch accused Poland’s secret services of being at the heart of the CIA’s European rendition operations.
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The most damning report was issued by a special committee of the European Parliament in January 2007, which alleged that several European governments were aware of more than 1,245 secret CIA flights in and out of European airports between 2001 and 2005. The report marked a turning point in Europe as more governments were forced to rein in the activities of the CIA and their own intelligence services. However, the Bush administration refused to see these disclosures and protests from its allies as a reason to change policy and instead carried on as before.

In January 2007, hundreds of prisoners marked their five-year stay at Guantánamo—in the same legal limbo as when they arrived—without a single high-level suspect brought to trial. Ghulam Ruhani, a twenty-three-year -old Afghan shopkeeper seized near Gardez, was the prison’s third inmate and was still there in 2007. Of the 773 prisoners who had spent time in the prison, 380, from twenty-nine countries, had been returned home. Of the detainees remaining in 2007, Afghans made up the largest number, followed by Saudis and Yemenis. As the number of prisoners in Guantánamo was reduced to 275 by January 2008, the United States doubled the number of prisoners it was holding at Bagram air base, near Kabul. In January 2008, there were 630 prisoners being held at Bagram, including some who had been there for five years and whom the ICRC had still not been given access to. Across the world, Guantánamo had become the most negative image of the United States in its war on terrorism. The example of Guantánamo had encouraged Muslim governments allied to the United States to subvert their own laws and constitutions, bring their governments into disrepute, and alienate their own people. The result was a series of political crises that were to hit Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Drugs and Thugs
Opium Fuels the Insurgency

In the summer of 1997, Abdul Rashid, the head of the Taliban’s so-called counter-narcotics force in Kandahar, patiently explained to me his unique job—banning farmers from growing hashish while allowing them to grow and produce opium, even though the Koran forbids Muslims to take any intoxicants. Rashid explained the dichotomy succinctly: “Opium is permissible because it is consumed by
kafirs
[unbelievers] in the West and not by Afghans, but hashish is consumed by Afghans and Muslims,” he said with a self-satisfied smile. According to his inescapable logic, what Afghans were addicted to was banned. Yet there was a more practical reason why opium was cultivated. “There would be an uprising against the Taliban if we forced farmers to stop poppy cultivation.”
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A few years later the Taliban’s falsification of Islamic teachings, combined with their need to fund their insurgency against U.S. and NATO forces and generate a support base for their movement by protecting opium-growing farmers, would lead to the largest production of drugs the world had ever seen. The Taliban resurgence, al Qaeda’s reorganization, and the restarting of its training camps for international terrorist groups after the U.S. invasion would have been impossible without the explosion in heroin production.

In turn, the attempts of the Afghan government and the international community to rebuild state institutions, curb warlordism, and create a viable legal economy were heavily imperiled by the illicit cash generated by drug traffickers. Despite spending large sums in aid programs, the international community failed to agree on how to eradicate opium, interdict shipments, catch drug traffickers, or provide farmers with alternative livelihoods. The flood of money to tribesmen on both sides of the border led to the spread of Talibanization. In short, one of the major reasons for the failure of nation building in Afghanistan and Pakistan was the failure to deal with the issue of drugs.