Disposable Pawns in a Game of Diplomatic Chess
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
In a federal court of appeals in Washington, DC today, a case has
been filed that casts troubling light on the apparent willingness of
the United States government to detain innocent men as "enemy
combatants" in order to secure international support for its 2003
invasion of Iraq.
Here, in brief, are the facts described in the filing.
In 1949, Maoist China seized a new far western province known to
many of its inhabitants as East Turkistan. Calling the new province
"Xingjian," the Chinese ruthlessly suppressed political and religious
diversity. Thousands of ethnic Uighers, who are Muslim by affiliation,
fled the province.
Among those who sought new lives free of Communist oppression were
twenty-three Uighers, who ended up in northern Afghanistan--long an
entrepot for Afghans, Turkic, and Chinese peoples. They lived in a
village near the eastern town of Jalalabad, doing odd construction and
manual labor. They never fought with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.
After their village was bombed in the American invasion of October
2001, they fled to Pakistan.
In December 2001, the Uighers were seized by Pakistani forces and
handed over to America for $5000 ransoms. It is a matter of public
record that the Pentagon, on the advice of Justice Department lawyers,
did not screen its detainees to determine if it was properly holding
them: It simply assumed everyone seized was a terrorist.
Grabbed by bounty hunters hungry for money, far from any
battlefield, the Uighers were nevertheless taken to Guantánamo. They
were labeled the worst of the worst and confined in cages. In a foreign
land, they were stranded, cut off from their culture, their homes,
their friends, their families.
After three years' detention without any process whatsoever, the
Uighers were given the first chance to present their case to a
"Combatant Status Review Tribunal," or CSRT. The military explicitly
told detainees that the CSRTs were not "habeas review"--that is, the
traditional judicial text for unlawful detentions. It is telling that
CSRTs were conducted at a rate of 50 per week. The Uighers had no
lawyer. They had no way of getting evidence. They were not permitted to
see the evidence against them.
A CSRT, indeed, is a simple affair. The officer says, "You're in al
Qaeda." The detainee says, " No, I'm not, and if you allow me to
present evidence, I can prove it." The officer refuses, stamps the file
"enemy combatant"--and we're done for the day.
Much of this is known. What was not known until now is why this
decision was made. In August 2002, as Iraq war drums was neared their
zenith, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to China to
talk about the war that the United States had already decided to launch
in Iraq.
But, for the Chinese, the Uighers were an issue. They demanded that
the United States recognize the Uighers as a terrorists, and designate
Uigher political dissidents as members of a terrorist group. Armitage
complied.
It appears that the August 2002 agreement reached with China was
even more detailed. In September 2002, mere weeks after the Armitage
visit, the filing explains, Chinese interrogators visited Guantánamo to
question the Uighers--and used with American authorization coercive
techniques such as environmental manipulation, stress positions, and
stress deprivations.
Let me reiterate what the Uighers' filing credibly asserts: At a
U.S. military facility, the United States permitted Chinese
intelligence agents to torture detainees as quid pro quo for Chinese
support for the Iraq War.
Of course, by time the war began, Chinese support within the U.N.
was, shall we say, less than imperative. In April 2003, the Uighers
were told, in the words of one interrogator "You are innocent. I am
closing the file on you." The United States began looking for a country
that would take the Uighers (who would be tortured if sent to China).
Three years later, several are still there.
The question today is whether the United States will continue to
keep innocent men in cages for years on end. It is a question of
whether to treat human beings as disposable pawns in a grand game of
diplomatic chess. A question of whether our principled belief in human
dignity must yield before the expediencies of illegal and unwise
warmongering.
Last week, the Justice Department issued an apology to Brandon
Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who had been wrongly detained as a "material
witness" and criminal suspects in the March 2004 Madrid bombing.
Mayfield, another innocent swept up in reckless and feckless
counter-terrorism operations, could have sued--and would doubtless have
secured a considerable (and embarrassing) judgment.
The Uighers, however, cannot invoke the shadow of money damages:
Recent legislation cuts off all money damages claims based on abuse and
mistreatment in global money damages claims. Unlike Mayfield, they must
ask the United States to do the right thing for its own sake.
Apparently, that's not enough for this Administration.
Indeed, the Uighers must cling to sanity and life against dire odds.
Their presence in U.S. hands is a continuing shame. A persistent scar
on America's reputation for honesty and decency.
In September, Congress passed the Military Commission Act, which
purports to limit the ability of federal courts to scrutinize the facts
surrounding certain detention decisions. The case of the Uighers shows
why the government wants to limit scrutiny.
When the Democrats took control of the House and Senate, they
promised accountability. For many Americans and for many citizens of
other nations, it is too late. But for some of the victims of
collateral damage from the Iraq war, the clock has not struck twelve.
We still can do some modicum of justice, save some cinder of face.
We should do so without delay.
Aziz Huq: "Disposable Pawns in a Game of Diplomatic Chess" (pdf)
