Latest Comment
Editorial
Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo
Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo, a film documenting the inhumane and international law defying conduct of the USA’s most infamous terrorist detention centre played to a packed out, morbidly fascinated audience in KLT 1 last week.
The event, jointly hosted by the Centre for American Studies, Kent Current Affairs Society, Kent Debating Society and UKC Amnesty International Society, included a question and answer session with former detainee, Omar Deghayes who was released in December 2007.
The film begins by illustrating the contrived paranoia that emanated through US foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasion into Afghan and Pakistani territory somewhat ironically named, Operation Freedom. The scenes that followed laid bare the brutal hostility and treatment towards the general population of the Middle-East who would be arrested and detained without adequate screening by the bounty motivated US military. The torture would begin in the numerous detention centres set-up within the region, which the film explicitly uncovered with damning scenes. The detainees would then be roped immovable and bagged blind inside cargo planes to be taken to Guantánamo Bay on the southern tip of Cuba.
The general narrative of the film is co-ordinated around interviews with former prisoners, including Omar Deghayes, lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.
While the former detainees spoke of personal experience of the hellish life they endured within Guntánamo, the lawyers spoke with clarity of the grave injustice the US forced upon the untried prisoners within its barbed wired camp. The most shocking laws were exposed, including the redefinition of terror to vainly protect Guantánamo Bay’s legitimacy. Furthermore, the detainees were held not as prisoners of war that would otherwise be protected by the Geneva Convention, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as ‘illegal enemy combatants’. This gives the US the freedom to torture their victims in whatever horrific manner they choose, whether it be waterboarding, exposure or prolonged constraint. Even the cells in which the detainees could only hope to sleep in were kept unbearably cold with air conditioners and forever bright with insomnia inducing lights.
Suicides are frequent within the detention centre and, even for those that are released; many are emotionally and psychologically scarred in what has been known as Torture Victim Syndrome. Omar Deghayes, is one of the fortunate few and, following the film, he spoke at length of what he called the ‘War of Terror’ that US foreign policy has created, not just in Guantánamo but all around the world.
In a week in which many are pleased to see President Obama’s most bold policy claims come to fruition, that of the Public Health Bill, students bore witness to Deghayes’s testimony. Yet there is an unfulfilled promise that was made upon Obama’s election – the closing of Guantánamo Bay. Obama stated he would close the centre within a year of office, that year has now passed and there still remains over 200 detainees that are held without trial in the torture chambers of Guantánamo. More so, there still remain 17 locations around the word that hold countless victims under the undignified, and frankly disgusting, anti-terrorist laws.