The Times today carried an article about Mullah Abdullah Zakir, a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay who was released after assuring, first the Americans and then the Afghans, that he wanted nothing more than to live out the rest of his life at peace and with his family. The Taliban has since confirmed that Zakir is now its top commander in Helmand Province. The Times reports that Zakir was captured in the lead car of a convoy of top Taliban leaders in December 2001. Subsequent evidence has suggested that he is a master bomb maker and his release from custody coincides with a nearly 300% increase in IED attacks in Helmand Province, which have resulted in the deaths of 44 British soldiers.
I have already written about the fact that many of those in Guantanamo are pretty nasty characters, indeed five high-profile detainees recently signed a statement which delcared that they were terrorists to the bone. It is clear that Zakir is of the same sinister ilk. However, no matter how evil a person is, there is no moral legitimacy in locking them up without trial or representation and the use of torture is a particuarly abhorrant stain on America’s moral reputation. We also know that the clumsy and brutal use of ‘Gitmo’ has helped America to lose crucial support on the Arab street and has played straight into the hands of Islamist recruiting sergeants.
Of course the now defunct and utterly discredited Bush/Cheney Doctrine maintained that torture and detention without trial were necessary tactics in order to protect the lives of thousands of innocent people. The sophistry of the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario was often wheeled out to provide philisophical support for such an un-constitutional doctrine. But if there really was a ‘ticking bomb’ it seems the last people we would want to rely would be the CIA. Even though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has admitted to planning 9/11 from ‘point A to point Z’, we are yet to see this (self-confessed) mass–murderer and his co-conspirators put on trial in a civillian courtroom because the abundant evidence against them has been tainted by the pointless use of torture. Worse, it is now evident that the CIA, with all its devlish interrogation techniques, cannot spot a master terrorist from two feet; 44 British soldiers may have paid the ultimate price for such manifest incompetence.
So not only was the Bush/Cheney Doctrine illegal and imoral, it has now been conculsively shown that it does not work. Bush is not the ‘World’s Number 1 Terrorist’, far from it, but his incompetence, arrogance, insouciance and disregard for basic morality and the US constitution during eight years in power, have created problems which may take many years to resolve.
