By Richard Mellor in California
I know I have written of this before, but when I was in eastern Macedonia in 2001-2, I had to go to these internet cafes to write and to communicate with home. I wrote a few posts about being back in Macedonia as I loved it when I was there twice before and it was part of Yugoslavia.
The interesting thing was that when I got off the plane after my arrival from Vienna, I came upon this huge rally in the main square in Skopje and wondered what it was about. I walked up to this guy to ask him and he had this large button on his lapel with the words, Thank You Mr. President on it.
I wasn’t sure what it was about, but he told me it was for our beloved war-mongering, imbecilic president, George W Bush. “What!” I responded, “Millions of us can’t stand him back home.” The majority of the crowd appeared to be Christian Slavs. The guy told me that Bush or the US had recognized the name of their country as The Republic of Macedonia. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but apparently there were Greeks demonstrating on the other side of the border because they consider that they are Macedonian. Things have changed and that seems to have been settled (for a moment).
Anyway, after I settled down, I met a guy in an internet café who told me that there were swarms of northern Europeans and Americans there now from different corporations, looking to set up shop and take advantage of the cheap labour. The visitors also included preachers and missionaries of various US religions, trying to find recruits. Many Yugoslavs are fairly political, and well aware of the US and CIA role in the world and how they have on many occasions used religious organizations as a cover for their meddling activities.
Followed by two men
But one time I couldn’t help noticing that I was beingfollowed by two men. My friend had suggested I register with the local police when I arrived, which I did, and assumed it might be a local police safety measure. Some people had told me that in this post 9/11 period, there were tons of Americans there and there were suspicions about them.
I stepped into the nearest internet café and they came in also. It was a bit disconcerting, as they sat either side of me, not directly to my right and left but a couple of seats away. They never spoke.
I am convinced that they were not police, but possibly US personnel as the US, (I found out later) had renditioned one person at least from Macedonia who, like many of them, was tortured, despite being completely innocent. Khaled el-Masri was his name and he was, “…..shackled, beaten, stripped naked, sodomised and drugged before being secretly transferred to a CIA-run ‘black site’ prison in Afghanistan.” It seems US torturers see sodomy as quite the thing when interrogating people, especially people with religious convictions and of the Muslim kind, though as a Lebanese, el-Masri might have been a Christian. Fortunately, I was not a threat, for which I am grateful.
The US had these ‘black sites’ everywhere, places where they would be safe from the scrutiny of the US population and muckrakers back home. One site was in Poland where Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, was taken. In Poland the CIA tortured and brutalized Abu Zubaydah. He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.
Waterboarded 83 times
In 2010, lawyers representing him filed suit against Poland for collaborating with the CIA in torturing him during his time at the Polish Black Site. His torture included water boarding, rectal rehydration, and being slammed into walls. (Wall Street Journal July 10, 2021). “In 2002, it lasted for 20 days, 24 hours a day. He was waterboarded 83 times in that period alone,” says Cornell law professor Joseph Margulies, who was later to become one of his lawyers.
In the US, lawyers for Zubaydah are seeking testimony from James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were CIA contractors, psychologists who designed torture methods. (Something sort of Nazi-like about this, isn’t there?). They designed the now infamous US interrogation practices that have been used throughout the world and in Guantanamo Bay. These two of course call torture “interrogation techniques”, but there are no two ways about it, they are modern day torturers.
Of Zubaydah, “….he’s the poster child for the program.” Says Margulies. Another of their victims tells of his experiences here. At one point, Mitchell and Jessen, concluded that Zubaydah was, “….a broken man and they concluded he didn’t know anything more. But the CIA thought he did, so the torture continued.” New York Times, June 10, 2021
The US is trying to block these two giving testimonies, based on national security, and, like Trump, Biden is also refusing to release information about Zubaydah’s treatment. The issue is before the Supreme Court, a body composed of old lawyers, whose job it is to protect capital and the capitalist system and we know there’s a few misogynists up there. As the New York Times puts it, “The central issue of the case concerns whether a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who has never been charged with a crime can subpoena testimony from the CIA contractors who supervised his torture.”
The powerful maintain their power through violence
This whole episode reflects “American values” as much as anything else. History is not pleasant, as the powerful maintains their power through violence and coercion of one sort or another. Every US worker should be appalled at these events, rather than turning a blind eye and carrying on with our lives as if nothing has happened.
The prisons in this country are full of working class people. Had we been paying attention to what the state we call ‘ours’ has been doing outside (and inside) our borders, 9/11 may never have occurred or at least we would know why it occurred.
I know that I give no credence whatsoever to those who blame the German people for allowing millions of “undesirables” to be tortured, killed and sent to death camps. ‘How could they let that happen?’, people say.
It’s not so hard to understand now, is it? Abu Zubaydah is still in Guantanamo, along with 38 other prisoners who never been charged with a crime, and personally, I couldn’t name one of them.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
