America can't handle the truth – about Guantánamo, torture or a man now free from both

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/09/truth-guantanamo-torture-abu-wael-dhiab

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He was wan, but he smiled. At a hospital here in Montevideo on Monday, my Guantánamo client Abu Wa’el Dhiab and I sat together for the first time without a shackle bolting him to the floor. My client grimaced in pain a lot – he has been on a hunger strike for the better part of the last two years, and it has gnawed at his spirit and his health. But he smiled: On Sunday, Abu Wa’el was finally released from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, where he had been held for 12 years without ever being charged for a crime, despite the US government having cleared him in 2009.

As pale and thin as this man was, laying there in the hospital bed, a spark has returned to his eyes.

His ordeal may be over now, but there is much about Abu Wa’el’s health and mistreatment I still can’t tell you. The US military balked when I asked for the lab work it conducted just after our doctors saw him – the Pentagon would not so much as give me an official weight in those final days at Gitmo. Instead, the Defense Department moved up the date of his flight to Uruguay at the last minute, in an attempt to evade a damaging photo-op: an emaciated hunger-striker being carried off a US military plane. And in an ongoing court dispute, the Obama administration is still fighting a federal judge’s order to release video tapes showing the abusive force-feedings that Abu Wa’el suffered – over 10 unvarnished hours of his daily reality.

The Pentagon’s approach throughout my client’s case has offered a disturbing glimpse into the US military bureaucracy’s mentality: Though indifferent to human suffering, the US defense department is strikingly keen to be sure evidence of that suffering never sees the light of day.

When news of Abu Wa’el’s possible release reached us here at Reprieve a short while back, we sent Abu Wa’el mango juice, in order to help him come down safely from his hunger strike. But in a bizarre twist I would have thought beyond the grim imagination even of his captors, the juice was confiscated. Rather than easing up on a man it knows full well would shortly be free to speak his mind, the Pentagon preferred to fiddle with timetables, in the dim hope he would land here in Uruguay before anyone could see what terrible shape he’s in.

This secret approach echoes the Obama administration’s attitude to the force-feeding tapes – the evidence that may well have gotten Abu Wa’el released. Days before they put him on that plane, the Obama administration filed an appeal against a judgment that the public and the press had the right to see this footage. (The Guardian is involved in the lawsuit.) Officials had insisted that the tapes would “inflame Muslim sensibilities”. We consented to hiding the faces and voices of guards; but it is the face of Abu Wa’el – his voice – that the US government is afraid you’ll see.

Make no mistake: the force-feeding tapes are upsetting. If they do go public, you will probably never see Guantánamo quite the same way again. The footage cuts through years of Pentagon rhetoric. It will force people for whom Guantánamo is a long-forgotten memory to see a human being trapped at the dark heart of the national security state. The tapes show a system that damages not just detainees but the young servicemen and women we ask to participate in it. They are, in short, the truth.

In the equally ridiculous secrecy surrounding the long-delayed release of the CIA torture report, a defender of the Bush-era rendition program actually put it rather well: “If you can’t stand discussing something in the light of day,” ex-CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht said, “then you probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

But if you think you’re going to get the truth about torture out of the so-called War on Terror’s wall of silence when the long-anticipated CIA torture report finally gets released on Tuesday, consider that we can’t even see that photo of my shackled client getting on a plane – that I am not even allowed to tell you about 10 hours of video of him getting force-fed by military service members.

Perhaps the American government can’t handle the truth about itself, from torture in secret CIA prisons to my client’s torture at the world’s most notorious prison, even after he is finally free. But I believe the American people can.

Abu Wa’el’s trial – the battle over the secret tapes and everything else – has been one long drive to wring the truth from Guantánamo. But no matter how hard the Pentagon may try to keep a vise grip on what we can say – and what evidence we can see – now nobody but Abu Wa’el owns his story. He has the rest of his life to tell it.