Guantánamo: Imperialist Barbarism

Free Omar Khadr!

In July 2002, Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, aged 15, was captured in Afghanistan after an intense battle with U.S. forces. Fifty U.S. soldiers, backed up by aerial bombing, destroyed a compound near Khost, killing four of the five inhabitants and seriously injuring Khadr. After a U.S. soldier died, Khadr was accused of throwing a grenade that allegedly killed him. At the Bagram U.S. airbase, Khadr’s torture began as soon as he regained consciousness. Denied pain medication, he was carried into interrogation rooms on a stretcher. Attack dogs were set on him and he was forced to clean floors on hand and knee, his wounds still wet.

Soon after, Khadr was shipped to the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay. To be imprisoned in Guantánamo is, by definition, to be tortured. Khadr, like many of the other 355 prisoners there, has been physically brutalized and subjected to intense psychological torment and humiliation designed to break him. He was kept in isolation, in a freezing cell, constantly hungry, sometimes drugged and denied most human contact. For two years, he was denied legal representation. When one of his lawyers visited Guantánamo, he was harassed, searched and had his documents taken. The bourgeoisie likes to invoke the “rights of children” when this serves its interests. But Khadr—captured while still a child and now facing trumped-up charges for acts that in some cases date back to when he was just ten years old—has been accorded no such rights.

Just as they aided the U.S. in Maher Arar’s deportation and torture, the Canadian imperialists have actively helped railroad Khadr. The previous Liberal government made a secret deal with the U.S. to have Canadian security agents interrogate Khadr in Guantánamo and pass the “results” to his U.S. jailers (Toronto Star, 6 June). The British and Australian governments—also loyal toadies of the Bush administration—secured the release of their own nationals even as they unleashed murderous racist “terror” scares against Muslims and others. But successive Canadian governments have neither requested Khadr’s repatriation, nor so much as protested his torture and the flagrant violations of his rights.

The recent show trial and guilty verdict against U.S. citizen Jose Padilla is an ominous portent of what Khadr could face. Padilla’s ordeal epitomizes the Kafkaesque legal netherworld of the “war on terror.” In May 2002 he was seized at Chicago’s O’Hare airport and held as a “material witness.” A month later he was declared an “enemy combatant.” Charged with no crime, for three years and eight months Padilla was tortured by extreme sensory deprivation punctuated by blasts of harsh light and loud, pounding noise. He was held in a tiny cell, denied contact with family and access to an attorney.

After Padilla’s lawyers successfully challenged his detention in a South Carolina federal court, the U.S. government concocted vague criminal charges of involvement in a terrorist conspiracy to commit murder. Evidence that Padilla was broken by the torture his interrogators subjected him to was rejected and he was forced to stand trial. The original “dirty bomb” plot was dropped like yesterday’s “weapons of mass destruction,” not least because those who fingered Padilla had themselves been tortured and made no secret of that fact. The guilty verdict is simply the logical conclusion of the entire brutal and chilling frame-up process (see “Republicans, Democrats Step Up War on Our Rights,” Workers Vanguard No. 897, 31 August).

Like Padilla, Omar Khadr was declared an “enemy combatant,” to be locked up indefinitely. This spring, almost five years after his capture, he was hit with a grab-bag of frame-up charges. In a June 12 protest letter to Stephen Harper, Lawyers Against the War noted that “the charges of conspiracy to aid Al Qaida, aiding the enemy and murder by an ‘unprivileged belligerent’ were not crimes until the passage of the MCA [Military Commissions Act], more than four years after Khadr was taken prisoner.” The Military Commission tribunals were created by the U.S. government to circumvent Geneva Convention rules (e.g., against “coerced testimony,” or torture). On June 4 this tribunal threw out the case against Khadr for lack of jurisdiction. The Pentagon has appealed and the government has declared that even if Khadr is found not guilty it may continue to hold him.

Torture, frame-ups, secret trials, indefinite detention: the entire “war on terror” apparatus is meant to create a climate of fear and intimidation, to accustom the population to ever more restrictions on our democratic rights. It is a pretext to expand the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state. As a July 2003 amici curiae (friends of the court) brief filed by the Spartacist League/U.S. and Partisan Defense Committee on behalf of Jose Padilla stated:

“The ‘war against terrorism’ is a fiction, a political construct, not a military reality. It is a political crusade conducted in the name of ridding society of a perceived evil.… The Executive’s declaration that its ‘war against terrorism’ forfeits constitutional protections for designated individuals echoes the regimes of shahs and colonels and presidents ‘for life’ from the Near East to Africa to Latin America, to justify the mass imprisonment and unmarked graves of political dissidents. Like them, the Executive is proclaiming the right to disappear citizens of its choosing.”

Labour Must Mobilize Against “Anti-Terror” Repression

The Canadian government, too, is arrogating to itself greater powers of domestic repression. The provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act, introduced in 2001, are so sweeping as to encompass almost anyone whose political views run afoul of the ruling class. An all-Canadian “no fly” list, thought to include up to 2,000 names, was launched in June. After the courts threw out as unconstitutional the cases against the five Muslim men held under the repressive “security certificates,” the government has vowed to introduce a new law that will again allow indefinite detention without charge.

Ottawa’s many anti-terror frame-ups have resulted in not one conviction. In 2003, “Project Thread,” in which 24 young men of mostly Pakistani origin were accused of the most outrageous and fanciful acts, was exposed as an utter racist fraud. Last year, a vicious sting operation resulted in 18 Muslim men and youth being charged in a “terror” plot. Even the cops’ own agent provocateur has said some of those he helped to entrap are innocent, and many of the charges have already been thrown out.

Bourgeois politicians and the press have demonized the Khadrs as an “Al-Qaeda Family” or “Canada’s first family of terrorism,” and call to revoke their citizenship because of their relationship to Osama Bin Laden. Yet in the 1980s, the imperialist rulers hailed the likes of Omar Khadr’s father Ahmed as “freedom fighters” because they enlisted with the CIA-backed mujahedin cutthroats to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. This is where Ahmed Khadr met Bin Laden. During its decade-long proxy war against the Red Army in Afghanistan, American imperialism embraced Bin Laden and his fellow Islamic holy warriors. In sharp opposition, Marxists stood with the Soviet Union and Afghanistan’s modernizing secular government against the U.S.-backed reactionaries. It was only after they had served their purpose in the imperialist crusade against the USSR that these onetime CIA assets were denounced as terrorists.

The September 11 attacks gave the imperialist rulers a golden opportunity to increase their repressive powers. The vulnerable Muslim minorities in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere are the immediate targets of the “war on terror,” but a more fundamental purpose is to intimidate and constrain the multiracial working class from social struggle. The kind of conspiracy charges today being wielded by the U.S. government have long been used against the left and labour movement. On both sides of the border, the rulers have exploited the repressive post-September 11 climate to directly target trade unionists, leftist university professors, foreign leftists and others. In Canada, for example, draconian new union-busting regulations now require port workers to get CSIS clearance as well as criminal record and immigration status checks.

From the start of the “war on terror,” we have stressed that what the bourgeoisie can get away with depends largely on the level of social struggle. The capitalists are plenty dangerous, but they rely on the labour of the working class for their profits. Mobilized independently of the exploiters, the proletariat, millions-strong, is the one force with both the material interest and social power to throw back this “war on terror,” defend its own interests and those of all the oppressed, and challenge capitalist rule.

One of Omar Khadr’s U.S. attorneys said: “Nothing we’ve seen comes close to the experience of Guantanamo. Not just the treatment of detainees but the brute force of state power” (rollingstone.com, 10 August). Our defense of Khadr and all those targeted by this vicious political hysteria is rooted in the Marxist understanding that the capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. This state, whatever its “democratic” trappings, is not “our state” but that of the class enemy, which needs to be smashed by proletarian revolution.

Mobilizing workers against the state’s anti-terror hysteria is central to our struggle to build a multiethnic revolutionary party. Such a party must be a real tribune of the people, fighting every manifestation of capitalist violence and barbarism, and exposing the workings of capitalism for all to see. Freedom for Omar Khadr! Down with the racist “war on terror”!