Thirty men remain at Guanta'namo today. Some have never been tried. Some have never even been charged with a crime. Their continued detention and torture, including, as recently as 2014, punitive, brutal forced feeding for hunger strikers, confirmed the status of the United States as a global scofflaw. To this day, keeping Guanta'namo open displays this country's contempt for international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention against Torture. It also displays contempt for our own legal system, including the Constitution's "supremacy" clause which makes any ratified international treaty like the Convention against Torture "the supreme law of the land."
In February 2023, Fionnuala N Aola'in, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, became the first representative of the United Nations ever permitted to visit Guanta'namo. She was horrified by what she found there, telling the Guardian that the U.S. has
"a responsibility to redress the harms it inflicted on its Muslim torture victims. Existing medical treatment, both at the prison camp in Cuba and for detainees released to other countries, was inadequate to deal with multiple problems such as traumatic brain injuries, permanent disabilities, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder."
"These men," she added, "are all survivors of torture, a unique crime under international law, and in urgent need of care. Torture breaks a person, it is intended to render them helpless and powerless so that they cease to function psychologically, and in my conversations both with current and former detainees I observed the harms it caused."
The lawyer for one tortured prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi, reports that al-Baluchi "suffers from traumatic brain injury from having been subjected to 'walling' where his head was smashed repeatedly against the wall." He has entered a deepening cognitive decline, whose "symptoms include headaches, dizziness, difficulty thinking and performing simple tasks." He cannot sleep for more than two hours at a time, "having been sleep-deprived as a torture technique."
The United States, N Aola'in insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented the CIA's torture program.
The United States should indeed foot the bill for treating not only the 30 men who remain in Guanta'namo, but others who have been released and continue to suffer the long-term effects of torture. And of course, it goes without saying that the Biden administration should finally close that illegal prison camp although that's not likely to happen. Apparently it's easier to end an entire war than decide what to do with 30 prisoners.
Unlawful Weapons
The United States is an outlier in another arena as well: the production and deployment of arms widely recognized as presenting an immediate or future danger to non-combatants. The U.S. has steadfastly resisted joining conventions outlawing such weaponry, including cluster bombs (or more euphemistically, "cluster munitions") and landmines.
In fact, the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically one might even say, hypocritically the U.S. joined 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is), that would constitute a "war crime."
Now the U.S. has sent cluster bombs to Ukraine, supposedly to fill a crucial gap in the supply of artillery shells. Mind you, it's not that the United States doesn't have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.
What are cluster munitions? They are artillery shells packed with many individual bomblets, or "submunitions." When one is fired, from up to 20 miles away, it spreads as many as 90 separate bomblets over a wide area, making it an excellent way to kill a lot of enemy soldiers with a single shot.
What places these weapons off-limits for most nations is that not all the bomblets explode. Some can stay where they fell for years, even decades, until as a New York Times editorial put it, "somebody often, a child spotting a brightly colored, battery-size doodad on the ground accidentally sets it off." They can, in other words, lie in wait long after a war is over, sowing farmland and forest with deadly booby traps. That's why then-Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon once spoke of "the world's collective revulsion at these abhorrent weapons." That's why 123 countries have signed the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. Among the holdouts, however, are Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.
According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the cluster bombs the U.S. has now sent to Ukraine each contains 88 bomblets, with, according to the Pentagon, a failure rate of under 2.5%. (Other sources, however, suggest that it could be 14% or higher.) This means that for every cluster shell fired, at least two submunitions are likely to be duds. We have no idea how many of these weapons the U.S. is supplying, but a Pentagon spokesman in a briefing said there are "hundreds of thousands available." It doesn't take much mathematical imagination to realize that they present a real future danger to Ukrainian civilians. Nor is it terribly comforting when Sullivan assures the world that the Ukrainian government is "motivated" to minimize risk to civilians as the munitions are deployed, because "these are their citizens that they're protecting."
I for one am not eager to leave such cost-benefit risk calculations in the hands of any government fighting for its survival. That's precisely why international laws against indiscriminate weapons exist to prevent governments from having to make such calculations in the heat of battle.
Cluster bombs are only a subset of the weapons that leave behind "explosive remnants of war." Landmines are another. Like Russia, the United States is not found among the 164 countries that have signed the 1999 Ottawa Convention, which required signatories to stop producing landmines, destroy their existing stockpiles, and clear their own territories of mines.
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