Guantanamo crimes made world less safe
George Monbiot

WHEN we learned last week that Abdallah Salih Al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.
Al-Ajmi, according to the Pentagon, was one of at least 30 former Guantanamo detainees who have “taken part in anti-coalition militant activities after leaving US detention”. Given that the majority of the inmates appear to have been innocent of such crimes before they were detained, that’s one hell of a recidivism rate. In reality, it turns out that “anti-coalition militant activities” include talking to the media about their captivity. The Pentagon lists the Tipton Three in its catalogue of recidivists, on the grounds that they collaborated with Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo. But it also names seven former prisoners, aside from Al-Ajmi, who have fought with the Taleban or Chechen rebels, kidnapped foreigners or planted bombs after their release. One of two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence, and neither reflects well on the US government. The first is that, as the Pentagon claims, these men “successfully lied to US officials, sometimes for over three years”. The US government’s intelligence gathering and questioning were ineffective, and people who would otherwise have been identified as terrorists or resistance fighters were allowed to walk free, despite years of intense and often brutal interrogation. Should this be surprising? Without a presumption of innocence, without charges, representation, trials, or due process of any kind, there is no reliable means of determining whether or not a man is guilty. The abuses at Guantanamo not only deny justice to the inmates, they also deny justice to the world.
Al-Ajmi, the authorities say, initially confessed in the prison camp to deserting the Kuwaiti Army to join the jihad in Afghanistan. He admitted that he fought with Taleban forces against the Northern Alliance. He later retracted this confession, which had been made “under pressure and threats”. When the Americans released him from Guantanamo, they handed him over to the Kuwaiti government for trial, but without the admissible evidence required to convict him. Among his defenses was that neither he nor his interrogators had signed his supposed testimony. The Kuwaiti courts, without reliable evidence to the contrary, found him innocent.
All evidence obtained in Guantanamo, and in the CIA’s other detention centers and secret prisons, is by definition unreliable, because it is extracted with the help of coercion and torture. Torture is notorious for producing false confessions, as people will say anything to make it stop. Both official accounts and the testimonies of former detainees show that a wide range of coercive techniques — devised or approved at the highest levels in Washington — have been used to make inmates tell the questioners what they want to hear.
In his book Torture Team, Philippe Sands describes the treatment of Mohammed Al-Qahtani, held in Guantanamo and described by the authorities (like half a dozen other suspects) as “the 20th hijacker”. By the time his interrogators started using “enhanced techniques” to extract information from him, Al-Qahtani had been kept in isolation for three months in a cell permanently flooded with light. An official memo shows that he “was talking to nonexistent people, reporting hearing voices, [and] crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end”. He was abused, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of sleep for a further 54 days of torture and questioning. What useful testimony could be extracted from a man in this state?
The other possibility is that the men who became involved in armed conflict after their release had not in fact been involved in any prior fighting, but were radicalized by their detention. In the video he made before blowing himself up, Al-Ajmi maintained that he was motivated by his ill-treatment in Guantanamo. “Twelve thousand kilometers away from Makkah, I realized the reality of the Americans and what those infidels want,” he said. He claimed he was beaten, drugged and “used for experiments” and that “the Americans delighted in insulting our prayer and Islam and they insulted the Qur’an and threw it in dirty places.” His lawyer revealed that his arm had been broken by guards at the camp, who beat him up to stop him from praying.
The accounts of people released from Guantanamo describe treatment that would radicalize almost anyone. In his book Five Years of My Life, published a fortnight ago, Murat Kurnaz maintains that one of the guards greeted him on his arrival with these words. “Do you know what the Germans did to the Jews? That’s exactly what we’re going to do with you.” There were certain similarities. “I knew a man from Morocco,” Kurnaz writes, “who used to be a ship captain. He couldn’t move one of his little fingers because of frostbite. The rest of his fingers were all right. They told him they would amputate the little finger. They brought him to the doctor, and when he came back, he had no fingers left. They had amputated everything but his thumbs.” The young man — scarcely more than a boy — in the cage next to Kurnaz’s had just had his legs amputated by American doctors after getting frostbite in a coalition prison in Afghanistan. The stumps were still bleeding and covered in pus. He received no further treatment or new dressings. Every time he tried to hoist himself up to sit on his pot by clinging to the wire, a guard would come and hit his hands with a billy-club. Like every other prisoner, he was routinely beaten by the camp’s Immediate Reaction Force, and taken away to interrogation cells to be beaten up some more. Fathers were clubbed in front of their sons, sons in front of their fathers. The prisoners were repeatedly forced into stress positions, deprived of sleep and threatened with execution. As a senior official at the US Defense Intelligence Agency says, “maybe the guy who goes into Guantanamo was a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a fully fledged jihadist.”
In reading the histories of Guantanamo, and of the kidnappings, extrajudicial detention and torture the US government (helped by the United Kingdom) has pursued around the world, two things become clear. The first is that these practices do not supplement effective investigation and prosecution; they replace them. Instead of a process which generates evidence, assesses it and uses it to prosecute, the US has deployed a process that generates nonsense and is incapable of separating the guilty from the innocent. The second is that far from protecting innocent lives, this process is likely to deliver further atrocities. Even if you put the ethics of such treatment to one side, it is surely evident that it makes the world more dangerous.

—Arab News


 

Fat generation
Tang Yuankai

DING Wei, an elementary school student in Beijing, is growing faster in weight than in height. One month ago, Ding celebrated her 11th birthday. Standing 1.3 meters tall, she now weighs 55 kg, heavier than her mother Xing Hong. The standard weight for a child of Ding’s age and height should be 30 kg, so she has a serious weight problem.
“I am not yet a fat kid,” Ding explained. Indeed, Ding is only the seventh heaviest child in her class. Nationwide, an alarmingly large number of children are fatter than Ding. Data from the Ministry of Education indicate that of urban children aged 11 to 12 years old, 8.1 percent are obese, and 15 percent are overweight. It is reported that the number of fat children in China has surged 28-fold in the past 15 years, doubling every five years.
In the past, the term “fat kid” was used in China to describe cute, chubby children carrying a few extra pounds of baby fat. Now, many kids and their parents no longer like to be addressed with this term, and Ding is one of them. Ding is not proud of the fact that she weighs more than her mother. Recently, she declared a resolution to lose weight.
Ding went to hospital to seek a solution to her weight problem and was only told that she has type II diabetes. “How is this possible?” asked Ding’s mother. “She is too young to get diabetes.” The doctors told Xing her daughter was not a rare case. Children now account for 5 percent of all the people suffering from diabetes in China, they said, and this percentage is growing by an annual average rate of 10 percent. The worse news is that, childhood obesity is associated with the earlier onset of diabetes-related complications, and a lower quality of life in adulthood.
Economic prosperity has allowed a rising number of Chinese to live an affluent lifestyle. Along with the change in lifestyle have come “rich people’s diseases” such as obesity, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. And these diseases are affecting people at an increasingly younger age.
“Now families have a higher income, parents would like their children to eat better,” explained Ji Chengye, a professor at the Institute of Child and Adolescent Health, Peking University. In his opinion, the occurrence of “rich people’s diseases” at a younger age is associated with an unhealthy diet. There is an old saying in China that “disease goes in by the mouth.” It used to be said that tainted food could cause illness, and now the sentence has a new meaning. According to Cai Wei, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Municipal Health Bureau, a surplus calorie intake as small as 2 percentage points every day can lead to “rich people’s diseases.”
Ding proves the point. Endless homework has confined her to a sedate lifestyle. “The imbalance between calorie intake and consumption is exacerbated by television, the Internet and all sorts of snacks,” Xing said. “Ding loves oily and sweet snacks, which can be heavy in calories. Among the top 10 worst junk foods listed by the World Health Organization, many are Ding’s favorites.”
Growing levels of child obesity are in fact an international problem. The classical therapy is a change of lifestyle. Children are growing and fighting obesity without retarding their development can be a complicated issue. For children, the most important prescription is to be more physically active rather than to eat less, according to Ji. “We cannot deprive children of the pleasure they get from food. That would be counterproductive,” he explained. “Physical activity is as important as a balanced diet. Even if a child has a family history of hypertension, exercise will reduce the risk.”
“Childhood obesity is a social problem that needs to be addressed through concerted efforts by different government departments,” added Ji. In recent years, he has been one of the key authors of Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of China’s School Age Children Overweight and Obesity Problem, at the invitation of the Obesity Working Group of the International Life Science Association of China. The book was published recently and more guidelines on children’s health are to follow it.
“Prevention of childhood obesity should proceed from collective prevention,” said Professor Chen Chunming, Honorary President of the Chinese Nutrition Society and member of the panel of experts on nutrition for the World Health Organization. While schools are key to the battle, families and communities should contribute their part to changing children’s diets and behavior.
Some experts have suggested offering a course on food and nutrition in schools to inject health consciousness into children. Li Duo, a food and nutrition professor at Zhejiang University holds that the government should enact laws to tackle the problem. Drawing upon experience of other countries, this February five health experts at Hangzhou submitted to the local government a proposal restricting the sale of carbohydrate drinks and calorie-rich fatty foods on the campus of primary or middle schools. It was a small step, but an important one in the battle against obesity across China.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)





What ails Lebanon?
Claude Salhani

THE parade of Lebanese political leaders to visit Washington in the last year has been impressive, as well as indicative of Washington’s resolve to stand by their man — make that their government, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government — and the anti-Syrian March 14 group.
Indeed, over the past few months the leaders of the anti-Syria camp have been holding court on the banks of the Potomac with officials at various levels of the US administration; from the “impromptu” encounters with President George W. Bush, down to lower-level State Department functionaries. The visitors from Lebanon included former president Amine Gemayel, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, recently released from 11 years of solitary confinement Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea, head of the National Liberal Party Danny Chamoun, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister, and just this week, Ahmad El Assaad, son of former House Speaker Kamel El Assaad.
The younger El Assad who was in Washington as violent and armed clashes broke out in Beirut between Hezbollah fighters, who enjoy the support of Syria and Iran and their Sunni rivals, who have the backing of the United States, France and Saudi Arabia.
The renewed gun battles plunged the country into its worst political crisis since the end of the civil war, raising the spectre of the 1975-1990 conflict. But not all Lebanese politicians are worried of a confrontation with Hezbollah; Ahmad El Assad actually welcomes a showdown, with his fellow coreligionists, saying that only severe pressure will work. Ahmad El Assad, chairman of LOG — Lebanese Option Group — told me in an interview during a visit in Washington, that his group is “trying to salvage Lebanon.” “We believe that salvaging Lebanon goes through breaking the monopoly of Hezbollah on the Shia community, because as long as Hezbollah has a monopoly on the Shia community in Lebanon, then they are able to block the moving forward process towards achieving a goal of having a modern 21st century Lebanon, because Hezbollah’s agenda’s is not Lebanese, it’s an Iranian agenda and it is opposite to what most people in Lebanon want; to have a prosperous modern and central government.
“So therefore as long as they are claiming to be the only ones speaking in the name of the Shia community, they are able to block that moving forward process. And therefore the only way to be able to move forward is by breaking the monopoly of Hezbollah on the Shia community,” said El Assad. El Assad admitted it is a difficult task, but said, “Great things are always difficult.” Without altering the very complex and delicate electorate law, El Assaad proposes “pushing for a new law based on proportionality.” And judging from the continued procession of Lebanese party chiefs, warlords and the like in Washington, it could well be that the Bush administration is also pushing for the same.

—Khaleej Times