ZGram - 3/28/2004 - "Chris Floyd: The Pentagon Archipelago"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

March 28, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Reading this essay below, you would think you are in Soviet Russia in 
the 1930s - horrific!

[START]

The Pentagon Archipelago

Down and Out in Guantanamo

By CHRIS FLOYD

This is the story of three innocent men, held in brutal captivity for 
more than two years; three innocent men, stripped, blinded, beaten, 
tortured, caged and silenced, all in the name of freedom and 
civilization; three innocent men, ground into the dust by an 
implacable power that defends its "enduring moral values" with the 
boot in the groin, the gun to the head--and the abetting of atrocity 
and murder.

It's the story of three Britons released this month from the U.S. 
concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--26 months after they 
began their progress through the guts of the Pentagon Archipelago, 
the chain of American detention camps and secret "interrogation 
centers" that now encircle the earth. In a remarkable interview with 
David Rose of The Observer--a pro-war UK paper--Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal 
Ahmed and Asif Iqbal from the middle England town of Tipton told the 
tale of their ordeal in the Bush Regime's legal purgatory.

(But first--who says these guys are innocent? They're Muslims, ain't 
they? They were captured by God's own soldiers in the devil land of 
Afghanistan, weren't they? As President Bush's new campaign ads have 
reminded us, every Ayrab-looking swarthian out there is a 
card-carrying terrorist minion of Osama bin Kerry unless proven 
otherwise by the proper authorities, right? So who exactly has 
cleared these men of all charges? Well, let's see: the CIA, the FBI, 
the Defense Intelligence Agency, MI5, MI6, London's Metropolitan 
Police, and the governments of the United States and Great Britain. 
Will that do?)

The three men, lifelong friends in their early twenties, went to 
Pakistan in September 2001 for Iqbal's wedding. The following month, 
as Afghanistan's civil war flared under the shadow of the impending 
American attack, the friends joined Muslim relief efforts in 
war-ravaged Afghan villages. As avowed moderates, they were under 
constant threat from the Taliban--the virulent extremists who'd been 
armed, funded and sustained in power by U.S. ally Pakistan and the 
Bush Family's business partners in Saudi Arabia.

When American bombs started falling, the friends tried to flee the 
country. But they were trapped in Kunduz with thousands of refugees 
when the city fell to U.S.-backed warlord Rashid Dostum, a former 
Soviet collaborator turned jihadnik. Known for his macabre 
punishments--he liked to see his victims torn apart by tanks--Dostum 
fell upon the surrendered masses with his wonted fury. Thousands died 
on a death march through the mountains to Shebargan, where Dostum 
linked up with U.S. Special Forces. There, the captives, including 
the Tipton men, were packed by the hundreds into metal truck 
trailers, where they were left for days to suffocate and die. Fires 
were lit under some of the trailers, roasting those trapped inside. 
Of the 35,000 who left Kunduz, only 4,500 remained alive.

The survivors were crammed into Shebargan's open-air prison, where 
they continued to die in droves--as U.S. forces watched coolly from 
the perimeter. Finally, the three friends were sent to an American 
camp in Kandahar, where, hooded and chained, they were "processed": 
stripped, rectally probed, beaten, forced to kneel for hours, naked, 
their necks pressed to the floor by a guard's boot. Then came the 
first "interrogation": again kneeling, chained, with beatings and 
kicking followed by questioning--as an agent stood on the back of 
their legs, pressing a pistol to their heads. This routine went on 
for weeks. The only relief came when British spies appeared for a 
session: "Don't worry, they won't beat you while we're here," the 
jolly James Bonds would say. At night, there were head counts every 
hour to prevent the prisoners from sleeping, and periodic shakedowns 
of their tents, which were open at all times to the winter weather.

Months later, for reasons unexplained--probably a false confession 
beaten out of someone else down the line, throwing out names of 
"accomplices" to sate the voracious interrogators--the Tipton men 
were frog-marched onto a plane bound for Cuba, triple-chained and 
beaten along the way, beaten and kicked upon their arrival. Then 
began the long, dazed, limbo-life of Guantanamo. Endless 
interrogations: each man was grilled at least 200 times, sometimes 
for 12 hours at a stretch, always kneeling, chained to the floor. 
Constant punishments: for "backtalk," or seeking privacy for their 
bowel movements, or arranging their utensils incorrectly. And always, 
over and over, the farcical accusations that could have easily been 
disproved with five minutes of investigation.

But their captors weren't interested in the truth; they wanted 
"results." Finally, after two years of relentless physical and 
psychological pressure--including the ever-present threat of a 
military tribunal and execution without appeal--the friends cracked 
and signed false confessions to the most ludicrous charge of all: 
that they were top bin Laden lieutenants, pictured with him in a 
video from August 2000, despite the existence of documentary 
evidence--witnesses, pay stubs, school records--that proved they were 
in England at the time. But before their show trial could begin, 
British intelligence belatedly examined the charge and confirmed the 
alibis of all three men.

Now they're free, as the Regime flushes the most embarrassing cases 
out of the system before the Supreme Court rules on the "legality" of 
the Bush gulag this summer. The treatment of these three innocent 
men, chained and beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but 
also--like that other crime, the invasion of Iraq--an enormous waste 
of time and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the grim 
fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.

But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago wasn't designed to fight 
terrorism; it's designed to advance terrorism--state terrorism. Its 
purpose is to establish the principle of arbitrary rule--in the name 
of "military necessity"--above the rule of law, in America and around 
the world. It's part of an overarching system of terror--aggressive 
war, assassination, indefinite detention, torture--employed to 
achieve the Regime's openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum 
dominance" of global politics and resources, particularly energy 
resources. Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, 
albeit on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.

Now we are all at the mercy of these entwined terrorist 
factions--both led by fundamentalist sons of two financially linked 
elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos, more Madrids, before 
this long, dark night is over.

Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular 
contributor to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's 
plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4 on Project 
Censored's final tally of the Most Censored stories of 2002. He can 
be reached at: cfloyd72 at hotmail.com