Guantanamo: A Guard's Story
26/01/2009
Chris Arendt saw prisoners dehumanised - now he’s fighting for the camp’s closure.
by Adam Forrest
Hope has hardened into expectation. People across the world are now counting on Barack to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but there is still a morass of legal quandaries to wade through before it happens. Human rights campaigners want it done in 100 days; more sober onlookers suggest it’ll take at least 18 months. Those who share a more direct experience of the notorious Cuban detention camp don’t want to wait that long to find their own closure.
Hope has hardened into expectation. People across the world are now counting on Barack to shut down Guantanamo Bay, but there is still a morass of legal quandaries to wade through before it happens. Human rights campaigners want it done in 100 days; more sober onlookers suggest it’ll take at least 18 months. Those who share a more direct experience of the notorious Cuban detention camp don’t want to wait that long to find their own closure.
The camp was set up at the US naval base in Guantanamo in the months after 9/11 to deal with “enemy combatants”. Bush’s hawkish and largely discredited Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said it would house the “worst of the worst”. Since the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, 775 detainees have been taken to the notorious prison. Just three people were ever charged and convicted.
Activists from the Cageprisoners group have brought together a collection of people with unique insight into what happens behind the barbed wire and walls, uniting a former Guantanamo guard with released detainees.
Chris Arendt – who grew up in Michigan – joined the US army shortly after 9/11, aged just 17 determined to do something. He didn’t last long. Disillusioned with his experience as a captor at ‘Gitmo’ from 2003-2004, he left the and joined Iraq Veterans Against the War. Arendt says he has been humbled to meet the prisoners he was forced to drag from cell to cell.
“It’s been cool,” says the young ex-soldier. “I remember some of the British guys; they were some of the most well-known in the camp. It’s definitely been a perspective-changer to talk to them in different circumstances.”
Arendt says he was shocked to find how such “dehumanising” treatment had been made so normal, a bizzare world where the corrupting of basic rights was encoded in mundane routines. He witnessed the use of pepper spray, of shackling hands and ankles together, “frequent flyer” programmes (moving detainees from their cell every hour, night and day), and blaring music at detainees at extreme volumes.
When Arendt began “fraternising” with the enemy he was sent to work at the camp’s operation control centre, but he concedes a lot of the guards were only too eager to carry out orders. “My days I spent relatively stress-free,” he says. “I learned Italian, I learned a bit about Islam, talked about politics with the inmates. But some guards would come back really angry because they’d had cocktails of piss and shit thrown on them."
“A lot of guys had been looking for deployment to Iraq,” he adds. “Some people were really disappointed they didn’t get to go kill people, so they were looking to take it out on somebody when we got to Cuba.”
Joining Arendt on his speaking tour of Britain is Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo detainee from Birmingham, who was tortured in a US jail in Bagram, Afghanistan. His own post-9/11 story is very different from Arendt’s (he was picked up by American forces after working in a school in Afghanistan), but Begg says they embraced “like brothers” when recently reunited.
“He’s very apologetic about all he’s seen, done and been involved in and he’s trying to do something about it,” says Begg, now 40. “I now have a better understanding of how it works for young people like Chris. He’s from the lowest rungs of society, the easiest to pick on when it comes to targeting people to join the military.”
In possession of an orderly, rational mind, Begg spent his darkest days of incarceration at Guantanamo trying to keep from despair or insanity. “I still had coherent thoughts, and I tried to make them clear to my guards. Through the interaction, some of them did start to empathise and start to think what sort of position they’d be put it.”
During his three years in Cuba, he read whatever he could – Wuthering Heights, copies of National Geographic with the maps removed – but the treatment meted out on the inmates led Begg to smash up what little he had in his cell on a couple of occasions. “It was built up of frustration of being in solitary confinement and not knowing when you were going to be released, a build up of seeing people tortured,” he recalls.
“They constantly go round your head and you try to make sense of it. But there are occasions where all sense is gone, and the only thing left is to… explode.”
Has the civil liberties campaigner forgiven his former captors? “It’s easy to forgive someone who asks for forgiveness,” he says coolly, “but it’s not easy with people who not only don’t ask for forgiveness, but continue to justify and rationalise torture.”
Arendt has little faith that the military establishment are on the cusp of a change of approach in tackling potential threats. “My resentment is directed most at our political leaders and the corporate people making money off this war,” he says. “I’ve lost friends who have died, I’ve lost friends who aren’t the same any more, and for what? It was all unnecessary.”
Arendt has little faith that the military establishment are on the cusp of a change of approach in tackling potential threats. “My resentment is directed most at our political leaders and the corporate people making money off this war,” he says. “I’ve lost friends who have died, I’ve lost friends who aren’t the same any more, and for what? It was all unnecessary.”
What Next?
How to close Guantanamo in several, not-so-easy steps…
As a lowly senator for Illinois, President Obama referred to Guantanamo Bay as “a sad chapter in American history”. But starting a fresh page is now his daunting duty. Where does he begin? Are the obstacles to the camp’s closure as insurmountable as many now fear?
The first step, civil liberties campaigners agree, is to end the system of military commissions, a legal black hole set up by the Bush administration to allow detainees to be tried outside of international and domestic standards. This would prevent the trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian imprisoned and interrogated at Guantanamo when he was just 15, and signal the new administration’s desire to see the conventional rule of law restored.
What then? What’s to be done with the remaining 250 prisoners? Most estimate that there is enough evidence to put around 40 to 50 detainees on trial in US courts. Human Rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, whose organisation Reprieve has represented many of the most high profile detainees at Guantanamo, believes the camp’s end is nigh. “We’ve been in discussion with Obama’s transition team about it, and closure is a very high priority for them,” he tells The Big Issue. “We’ve relied on the federal courts for 200 years. If the government thinks they’ve done anything wrong, then put them on trial in a regular court.”
Ken Gude, director of international rights at the Centre for American Progress believes another option would be to use military courts, as prescribed by the Geneva Convention, but would not apply to most detainees since they were not picked up on the battlefield. “The most favoured route should be regular federal trial,” says Gude. “Those procedures have already been used to incarcerate and put on trial some of the most dangerous terrorists. The US justice system has the ability to handle it. It’s a great shame and tragedy that we pursued a course that threw aside all that and viewed traditional justice
as deficient.”
America may have to deal with some difficult trials and unpalatable verdicts as it returns from one idea of justice to another. Susan Crawford, the Bush administration official in charge of the military commissions, recently admitted torture was used to obtain testimony from Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi man suspected of involvement with the 9/11 attacks. “It demonstrates how incompetent and mismanaged the process has been,” says Gude.
Another 150 or so of Guantanamo’s detainees are already cleared to leave, but as refugees in danger if they return to countries of origin, are in need of somewhere to go. So far only Portugal and Albania have agreed to resettle some of the prisoners, but many observers believe several other European countries, including Britain, France and Germany, are willing to work with the Obama administration to find a solution. The government of Yemen will also have a big part to play in any resolution – 97 detainees are Yemeni – but the US is reluctant to let them return until there is a rehabilitation programme set up to its satisfaction.
Resettling the refugees would leave one final, anomalous group at the place Tony Blair once described as a living “anomaly” – the detainees considered too dangerous to release, but for whom there isn’t sufficient evidence to charge. “It’s a bizarre category,” says Stacey Sullivan, counterterrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch. “At some point, you either get evidence to prosecute or let them go. Our recommendation has been to review the cases and put them into one category or the other. You have to live with letting some go. Potential terrorism suspects can be watched.”
Sullivan’s point speaks of the wider, ongoing struggle to uphold human rights as America engages with its enemies, either real or imagined. Stafford Smith estimates that the United States currently keeps 20,000 in military prisons around the world; places where the concept of legal rights is sketchy, at best. “We can’t keep treating the (terrorism) situation like it’s a war and rules don’t apply – we’ve got a criminal justice system, we should just use it.”
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