WikiLeaks on Thursday started releasing a set of more than 100 “classified or otherwise restricted” files from the U.S. Defence Department that details policies for dealing with detainees in U.S. military prisons such as Guantanamo Bay.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said the documents reveals the “excesses” of the US-driven “war” on terror.
"The ' >Detainee Policies ' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense. It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown 'enemy' and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later,” he said in a statement from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed since June after seeking refuge there to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual misconduct.
Among the first documents to be released was the foundation document for Guantanamo Bay called the “ >2002 Camp Delta SOP (Standared Operating Procedure) manual ’’.
WikiLeaks said that this previously unpublished manual “went on to shape successive years in the Guantanamo Bay prison complex and other U.S. military prisons around the world, such as Abu Ghraib.”
“This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West with good reason,” said Mr. Assange.
WikiLeaks said some of the documents could only be described as relating to “policies of unaccountability.” One such document, it claimed, included a 2005 guidance on discreetly “disappearing” detainees from official US records.
“Even references to this document are classified `SECRET//NOFORN’. Detainees may be disposed of in this manner without leaving a significant paper trail,’’ it said.
Other documents to be released over the next one month are related to interrogation techniques used at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
WikiLeaks said they showed that while direct physical violence was prohibited in writing, “a formal policy of terrorising detainees during interrogations, combined with a policy of destroying interrogation recordings led to abuse and impunity.”
“We learn of policies that apply to international forces: a 13-page interrogation policy document from 2005 relates to all personnel in the Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF–I). It details ‘approved’ ‘interrogation approaches’. The documents detail the promotion of exploitative techniques such as the ‘Emotional Love Approach: Playing on the love a detained person has for family, homeland or comrades’. In the ‘Fear Up (Harsh)’ approach, by contrast, `the interrogator behaves in an overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice in order to convince the source he does indeed have something to fear; that he has no option but to co-operate’, it said in a press release urging NGOs and rights activists to investigate the ``important issues’’ that the documents raised.
