Center for International Policy

Torture Not what U.S. is Supposed to be About

By: Wayne S. Smith
February 4, 2005
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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Writing on these pages on Jan. 12, I discussed the reports coming out of the Guantanamo Naval Base concerning the abuse, even torture, of prisoners. Some observers, I pointed out, were beginning to call it "our own Devil's Island."

On Jan. 19, the Cuban government (almost inevitably, one might say) handed U.S. officials in Washington and in Havana a formal protest over these "flagrant violations of human rights" being committed on "illegally occupied Cuban territory."

The abuses, the protest went on to note, violate various international treaties and conventions, in particular the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention Against Torture, prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. They also, the Cubans noted, violate Article II of the Coal and Naval Stations Agreement of February 1903 by which the United States committed itself to ensure that Guantanamo would be used exclusively as a coaling and naval station and for no other purposes.

I've examined the 1903 agreement and the Cubans are right. That is exactly what Article II says. So we are in violation of the agreement under which we hold the Guantanamo Naval Base. And, of course, the abuse of these prisoners violates as well the various conventions cited by the Cubans, in particular the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Few in the American media have mentioned this Cuban protest. No wonder. How embarrassing! The U.S. accuses Cuba of being "an outpost of tyranny" and demands that it release political prisoners. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Our boys in the State Department and the Pentagon have given Cuba a golden opportunity to say, in effect: "What about your own conduct? What about your own treatment of prisoners?"

American officials reportedly have reacted with outrage to the protest notes, denying that abuses have taken place and saying the United States would not be lectured to by the likes of Cuba.

One can certainly understand their discomfiture. Indeed, all Americans should be embarrassed by the fact that Cuba has protested the abuse of prisoners on the Guantanamo Naval Base.

But who has caused our embarrassment? Our own government, that's who!

The officials receiving the protest notes can adopt a holier-than-thou stance if they wish and claim that prisoners at Guantanamo have not been abused, but against the images coming out of Abu Ghraib and other U.S. military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one is likely to believe them. The reports of abuses at Guantanamo, moreover, come not from The Daily Worker or Prensa Latina, but from FBI agents who had been on the base and from the International Red Cross.

And now there are new reports. A former Army sergeant who had served as an Arabic interpreter at Guantanamo has written a book, the text of which has been obtained by The Associated Press. In it, he describes how female interrogators at the base used a mix of sex and religion to break Muslim prisoners.

One of these interrogators, for example, smeared a red substance on a prisoner's face, telling him it was her menstrual blood, and then locked him in a cell without water to wash it off, in effect, leaving him unclean and thus, under Muslim law, unable to pray to his God for help. Not physically painful perhaps, like being shackled hand and foot on the floor overnight as many were, but mentally devastating to that particular prisoner.

This kind of thing, this abuse of prisoners, is not what our country is supposed to be about. It is deeply humiliating -- and injurious to our position in the world at large. No wonder that for the first time ever, the United States has been excluded from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

Wayne S. Smith is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. and the former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1979-82).