Human rights abuses in the name of "counterterrorism": The United States has committed a lot of crimes in "black jails" overseas

【Mingdi】

Author: Li Hao (Lecturer, Foreign-related Police College, Chinese Min Public Security University)

The arbitrary exercise of unsupervised absolute power by overriding military force can be carried out without warning, without evidence, without prosecution, on the basis of a person's race or speech alone. Such dark, terrifying, and depressing scenes of despair often appear in the historical memory of "pre-modern" tyranny and in the contemporary accusations of the United States and the West against other countries. However, it is only necessary to rely on the Western media and the after-the-fact disclosures from within the US system to show that it is precisely the US state apparatus that has a deep "skill" in this regard and has been fully used in the "war on terror" that it vigorously promotes.

"Enemy combatants" who are not subject to external supervision

Taking advantage of the security anxieties caused by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US government launched a war with unlimited scope and endless time in the name of "counter-terrorism", sowing chaos all over the world and prolonging disasters to this day. In the past 20 years, the threat of terrorism has not disappeared, but the US "anti-terrorism" military operations have caused countless evil acts of human rights violations, among which the US overseas secret prisons, which can be called "hell on earth", are notorious for their wanton trampling on human rights and even human nature in the name of "anti-terrorism".

In November 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush issued a "military order" under Congress's war authorization, announcing the imposition of "detention, interrogation, and trial" measures during the "war on terrorism" against "non-U.S. citizens" deemed by the U.S. government to be "suspected of terrorism." In order to maximize the evasion of all external oversight, the United States military and intelligence agencies have established secret and closed prison facilities outside the United States mainland in foreign territories, leases and allies conquered by them to carry out the order. In conjunction with this, the United States Government concocted the concept of "enemy combatants" to refer to the objects covered by the order. The United States Government defends the denial of the basic rights of "enemy combatants" on the basis of the concept of "illegal combatants" that already exists in military law. However, the 2006 U.S. Military Commission Act defines "adversarial combatants" far beyond adversaries on the battlefield, and Bill Gurman, former director of the legal department at the Center for Constitutional Rights, argues that it covers "anyone who participates in or supports acts hostile to the United States." In theory, anyone, whether on a commuter bus, on a vacation trip, or in their own bedroom, could be identified as an "enemy combatant" because of the U.S. government's unsupervised and unrestrained "suspicions" under war authority, and thus be abducted to a secret prison in one corner of the globe and disappear from the world's sights.

These U.S. secret prisons abroad can be called the black hole of modern civilization, and the "human rights," "rule of law," and "procedural justice" that the United States and the West are keen to flaunt no longer exist in them. A memorandum drafted in August 2002 by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John You and other judicial experts claimed that the administration in a state of war could use torture against "intelligence sources." In the notorious abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, documents exposed in 2004 explicitly authorized the use of torture by U.S. military personnel, which the New Yorker weekly reported came from then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The tyranny of absolute power has taken all sorts of cruel acts beyond interrogation, and media-revealed evidence shows that most of the torture and executions carried out by U.S. military personnel were carried out solely for "fun." On June 9, 2006, three prisoners were told that three prisoners "hanged themselves with towels at the same time" at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, and that U.S. military commander Bumgana revealed to reporters that the three dead had a lump of cloth stuffed in their throats, making it difficult to determine the true cause of their deaths. The media questioned the case, but afterwards the journalists were quickly expelled, Bumgana was suspended for investigation, and there was no follow-up to the whole incident and no one was responsible. Only Hickman, a U.S. sergeant who was guarding Guantanamo at the time, was driven by a sense of responsibility to publish his book exploring the truth of the case. He believes that in a cell with nearly transparent walls and inspected by guards every three minutes, it is almost impossible for three prisoners to conspire to commit suicide at the same time using towels that have not been distributed for a long time. According to U.S. investigative journalist Jane Meyer, the CIA reported to President Bush as early as 2002 that at least one-third of the prisoners in Guantanamo prison were "wrongfully imprisoned," but the U.S. government was indifferent to the fate of these innocents and allowed them to continue to be tortured as "enemy fighters" with almost all basic human rights.

"Non-existent prisoners" arbitrarily designated by the CIA

In Western historical memory, the secret police and their political persecution are one of the most obscure parts. However, under the banner of "counter-terrorism", such organizations and their powers have shown signs of "rebirth" in the United States in the 21st century, and the intelligence agencies that have gained more and more extensive police power are breaking through the most important "safety valve" of modern democratic politics in the West, and are particularly prominently reflected in the "external" intelligence agencies such as the CIA.

In 1995, the Clinton administration authorized the CIA to "extradite" terrorist suspects who had been indicted in U.S. courts to U.S. territory. In the early stages of the "war on terror", with the support of the US government's extensive war authorization, the scale and scope of such "extradition" activities were greatly expanded, and the means were increasingly free from the minimum degree of supervision and restraint. In December 2003, Khalid Masri, a Lebanese-German carpenter, was kidnapped by CIA agents to a secret prison in Afghanistan while on vacation in Macedonia. After three months of imprisonment and torture, the director of the CIA discovered that the wrong person had been arrested, but continued to imprison him for two months before taking him to Albania for release without giving any explanation. During his imprisonment, Masri evaporated, his family moved back to Lebanon because of his disappearance, the German government insisted it did not know his whereabouts, and the United States officials never officially expressed their opinion on his fate. Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA, revealed in 2007 that "non-existent inmates" like Masley had at least 100 people in secret prisons around the world. Such detention and "extradition" activities, which have not been carried out without any judicial process or even notification to the Government of the country concerned, violate all relevant international law and conceal the truth from international organizations such as the Red Cross, should be considered war crimes. But it is clear that the U.S. government will not be held accountable for this. In May 2006, a U.S. court dismissed a lawsuit brought by human rights groups to help Masri against the CIA director on the grounds that it "could endanger national security," and the U.S. government subsequently "warned" the German government that German prosecutors would issue arrest warrants for U.S. agents suspected of kidnapping Masri.

The CIA's selection of its victims is often based solely on "confessions" obtained from other prisoners through torture, fragmentary or specious images recorded using various surveillance techniques, and hearsay from various "informants." A 6,200-page report on the CIA's use of torture, released by the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014, showed that the agency even tried to force their families to comply by kidnapping and imprisoning people with intellectual disabilities. During the "interrogation" of prisoners who fell into its hands, the CIA's enthusiasm for torture shocked and angered even its FBI counterparts. The torture "system" on which it relies is largely derived from James Mitchell, a U.S. Air Force "psychologist" with no background in interrogation work, whose main reference to his "invention" was the "learned helplessness" experiment completed by electric shock dogs in the 1970s. According to scholar Andrew Sullivan, the concept of "enhanced interrogation" invented by the U.S. government to legalize the use of torture comes from the "creation" of Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany, in a 1937 memorandum. Sullivan commented: "The use of these methods was explicitly recognized as a war crime in 1948, and the punishment was the death penalty. José Rodríguez Jr., chief of the CIA's Operations Division, ordered the destruction of videotapes documenting prisoners' "enhanced interrogations" before his retirement, because if its contents were exposed, "it would be a devastating blow to the CIA." However, under a joint petition of 56 Democratic lawmakers, requests for an investigation and prosecution of the CIA's unlawful imprisonment and use of torture were ultimately rejected for "endangering national security."

The U.S. government, anxious to get out of the "war on terror, and the U.S. legislature, which fears the expansion of executive power, gradually took steps after 2009 to stop most of the policies implemented in the name of "counterterrorism." However, considering the values embodied behind these policies – the absolute distinction between "enemy and us", the denial of human rights, the contempt for multiculturalism and the recognition of extreme cruelty, the world has to feel highly vigilant against the United States, which still wields the baton of hegemony on the international stage and spares no effort to maintain its hegemony.

Guangming Daily (2022.05.20 12th edition)