Outer Darkness: The Gulag Cancer Grows, State Terror Intensifies

[Joanne98]

Saturday, 24 May 2008
I.
The United States government is holding some 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to "harsh interrogation techniques" (to use the prim locution for "torture" used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

Many of these captives are stuffed into holding pens in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, which is still in operations despite the momentary torture-photo scandal of 2004 -- and despite Bush's earnest promise to Iraqis to tear down that hated symbol of Saddam's torture. Other captives are crammed into the holds of prison ships floating around the world. Still others languish in the torture chambers of the Bush Administration's Terror War allies -- despotisms, tyrannies, brutal kingdoms -- having been "renditioned" there by American agents, sometimes after being kidnapped, or sold into captivity by bounty hunters, or snatched up in mass sweeps or random grabs or simply for having the wrong name, the wrong face, the wrong color, the wrong religion.

In any civilized country, such facts would provoke banner headlines, marathon television debates, investigations, prosecutions and widespread public revulsion. It might have done so even in the United States not all that long ago. But the most recent encapsulation of these horrors -- from Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve, speaking earlier this week on Democracy Now -- has caused scarcely a ripple. Even that is putting it too strongly; in the mainstream media, the news has been greeted with the usual iron curtain of silence.

And this even though Stafford -- who has served as the lawyer for more than 50 prisoners at Guantanamo (ironically, one of the few places in the American gulag where captives now have limited access to very circumscribed legal help) -- offers a genuine revelation in his interview, one that cries out for more investigation from, say, a network or newspaper with large-scale resources. And that is the fact that the Bush Administration is shipping captive from different parts of the world to Iraq, where they are beyond the scrutiny of the press -- or those pesky attorneys with their silly concerns about the rule of law:


Well you know, one thing that my charity, Reprieve, out of London, we've been trying to do is track down the real ghost prisoners in this process. And if you look at Guantanamo Bay, 270, roughly, as you mentioned, prisoners in Guantanamo, but according to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they're in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there's a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn't get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can't get any sort of legal rights.

And when you look around the world, there's a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we've identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we've got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there's a bunch of proxy prisons—Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you'd like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.


As Smith rightly notes, the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay -- for all its iconic status -- is actually an effective diversion from the large-scale atrocities going on across the Bush Gulag. (And the Bush Administration is trying to turn into an even greater diversion, with show trials of several Gitmo inmates scheduled for the height of the presidential campaign -- although, again, those law-and-order whiners keep getting in the way, most recently forcing a postponement of the first show trial from its intended June start date.) The most extensive -- and most secretive -- aspects of the Gulag are taking place in the outer darkness, in furtive hidey-holes in Iraq and elsewhere.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1517&Itemid=135