ICRC and government officials would neither confirm nor deny the content of the report by the Red Cross, based on an investigation this June, citing their “bilateral agreements on confidentiality.”

“The report of the June visit said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo,” reported the November 30 New York Times, “and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through ‘humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.’ Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly ‘more refined and repressive’ than learned about on previous visits.” The Times said it recently obtained a memorandum, based on the report, that quotes from it in detail and lists its major findings.

Washington holds 550 men from 42 countries at its naval base in Guantánamo—territory occupied by U.S. imperialism against the will of the Cuban people. It uses the designation “enemy combatant” to describe those it holds there to justify denying them legal rights, including those accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The prisoners have been held at Camp Delta since early 2002. Many were captured by the U.S. military during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

The brutality—physical and psychological—mirror the degrading of prisoners by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in the prison system inside the United States.

“The construction of such a system” in Guantánamo, said the ICRC report, “whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual, and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”

Medical files of those detained were “literally open” to the jailers about to question their captives, and cases of mental illness were found to be caused by prolonged solitary confinement. The ICRC report found that the “apparent integration of access to medical care within the system of coercion” resulted in prisoners refusing to cooperate with doctors as a result of the assistance to their jailers and torturers the medical personnel provided.

“One regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels,” U.S. military personnel told the Times in October.

Media accounts of the ICRC report say there were frequent prisoner complaints of female jailers baiting their captives with sexual overtures. This backs up the testimony of prisoners who have been released who say they were sexually harassed at Guantánamo. U.S. authorities acknowledge that one female interrogator was disciplined for removing her blouse during questioning.

The Pentagon rejects all charges of abuse at Guantánamo. The commander of the Guantánamo prison, Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, told reporters, “We take everything the Red Cross gives us and study it very carefully,” and that he agrees “with some things and disagrees with others.”

“The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantánamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism,” a Defense Department statement said, and carries out “sensitivity training” to ensure the jailers “understand the procedures for protecting the rights and dignity of detainees.”

In March 2002, however, government lawyers announced that the president was not bound by either the Convention Against Torture or a federal anti-torture statute because of his broad authority to “protect the nation from terrorism.”

The government has taken this argument to its logical conclusion in a case in federal court of Guantánamo prisoners requesting their release because they are being held solely on the basis of evidence obtained through torture. Government attorney Brian Boyle said December 2 that the challenges to detention should be thrown out because the prisoners “have no constitutional rights in this court,” the Associated Press reported.

If “enemy combatant” review tribunals “determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due process clause (of the Constitution) prohibits them from relying on it,” Boyle told the court. He added, “I don’t think anything remotely like torture has occurred at Guantánamo.”

The Pentagon set up the review tribunals after a June 28 Supreme Court ruling that the prisoners at Guantánamo have the right to use the U.S. courts to challenge the charges against them. Most had been held for two years or more without charges against them or access to attorneys or visits by relatives. AP reports that these tribunals have so far reviewed the cases of 440 Guantánamo prisoners, and released one.  
 
 
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