From Gaza to Guantanamo:
Building a New Movement for Human Rights
 

GCMHP Conference, Ramallah, October 26-28, 2008

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Introduction

      On December 10, 2008 the world will mark the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the document that enumerates the principles at the heart of nearly all the international human rights instruments adopted since 1948.  

     Two other events that occurred in 1948 would sorely test the world's commitment to international law.   It was, of course, the year that Israel proclaimed its statehood and implemented the widespread and systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people known as the Nakba in a process of colonization and land appropriation that is still ongoing.1 

     It was also the year that the Nationalist Party came to power in South Africa and institutionalized the Apartheid system. If the Nakba and the failure to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have stretched to the breaking point faith in governments and institutions established to uphold human rights, the end of Apartheid gives us reason to believe in the transforming power of a just cause. There are lessons here that we can draw upon as we seek not just the end to the siege of Gaza, but the beginning of an era when the promise of the Universal Declaration becomes real for Palestinians, and new life is breathed into the movement for human rights for all peoples.  
 

Human Rights in Peril

     For sixty years, the Question of Palestine has presented the United Nations with a critical test.  Its failure to bring about a just conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has perhaps done more to undermine international law and the authority of the United Nations as an institution than any other development of the 20^th century. As this audience well knows, nearly every one of the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration, in addition to provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and hundreds of United Nations General Assembly and Security Council resolutions have been consistently ignored by Israel in its posture toward the Palestinians, while the United States has protected its ally from international censure.

     For the last sixty years, even as it has conducted covert actions and military invasions in more than 70 countries around the world, the US has promoted itself as the world's leading champion of human rights.2   It can no longer do so with any credibility, least of all in Arab countries.3  Today, to the international community and to growing numbers of Americans, "Guantanamo" has become shorthand for a range of US-perpetrated human rights abuses, from the use of torture and cruel and degrading treatment, to indefinite detention and the abolition of fundamental fairness and due process procedures guaranteed by international law and the US Constitution.  The US has become known as a nation that kidnaps and "disappears" people and maintains an archipelago of CIA-run "black sites," populated by "ghost detainees."4  A recent report compiled by a US Congressional subcommittee finds that US global approval ratings are at record lows because of the war in Iraq, ongoing support for repressive regimes, perceived bias in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the abuse of prisoners in violation of treaty obligations and international law, and "a growing belief in the Islamic world that the United States is using the 'war on terror' as a cover for its attempts to destroy Islam."5  This report was shunned by the US mainstream media, but picked up by Internet blogs and the foreign press.

     If international law and the very concept of human rights have been undermined by the US pursuit of its "war on terror," they have also been uniquely endangered by Israel's intransigence and the brutality of its 41-year-old military occupation.  As former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard warned in January 2007, if the West cannot "demonstrate a real commitment to the human rights of the Palestinian people" the entire international human rights movement "will be endangered and placed in jeopardy."6  He describes the pivotal importance of the Palestinian issue in these terms:

     "For years the occupation of Palestine and apartheid in South Africa vied for attention from the international community.  In 1994, apartheid came to an end and Palestine became the only developing country in the world under the subjugation of a Western-affiliated regime.  Herein lies its significance to the future of human rights. There are other regimes, particularly in the developing world, that suppress human rights, but there is no other case of a Western-affiliated regime that denies self-determination and human rights to a developing people and that has done so for so long."

     In the remainder of my talk I want to do three things: first, I will draw parallels between what are in my view the two most potent symbols of the betrayal of the human rights movement, Gaza and Guantanamo.   Second, I will say something about the collusion of the mental health and medical professions in the horrors of Gaza and Guantanamo. And finally, I will suggest sources of hope for rebuilding a movement for human rights in the 21^st century that can pressure both Israel and the United States to demonstrate a real commitment to human rights, including the human rights of the Palestinian people.  
 

Acting with Impunity, from Gaza to Guantanamo

     Having first visited the Gaza Strip in 1988 shortly after the start of the first intifada, and having paid many visits since then, I am shocked by the cumulative impact of the siege that has been imposed on Gazans, with varying levels of severity, since at least 1991.  I am also alarmed and dismayed about how little is known about what is happening here within the US, the country which is making the inhuman siege possible.

     Few Americans are aware that a former US president, Jimmy Carter, has termed the lethal blockade of Gaza "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth" in a talk he gave on May 25 of this year to the Hay Festival in Wales. His remarks urging European governments to break with the US/Israeli position and demand an end to the siege were ignored by the mainstream US media. As he wrote in the May 8, 2008 UK Guardian, "The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished."

     The US media's blockade of information about Gaza has been nearly as total as the siege itself with a few "newsworthy" exceptions, such as the dramatic pictures of Gazans streaming into Egypt through a break in the border wall in search of food in January of this year, and the arrival in Gaza in late August of two small wooden boats, the Liberty and Free Gaza. Virtually nothing has been said about the illegality of Israel's actions and the extent of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza, despite the urgent communiques and reports issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross and a range of human rights organizations that must have crossed the desks of journalists.     

     Also absent is the fact that the Palestinian people are being punished for voting the wrong way in a democratic election that was held at the urging of the international community, and which was found by former President Carter and other monitors to be entirely free and fair.  How could this be grasped by an American public conditioned to believe that President Bush's mission is to spread democracy throughout the Middle East?  

     Americans have also over the past seven years been conditioned to think, as President Bush intoned, that you are either "with us or against us in the fight against terrorism,"7 and if you are with us, you are entitled to do whatever needs to be done to keep your people safe.  And who is a better friend that Israel? 

     Following the attacks of 9/11, the very existence of an Israeli "occupation" has been airbrushed away in the prevailing US discourse, or made to seem as well-intentioned as that which the US military was imposing on Iraq.  It has been increasingly difficult to interest Americans in what was being done with their tax dollars in the occupied territories when, with each suicide bombing in Israel, post 9/11 America was reminded of just how much the two peoples have in common and why they had to stand together in the battle against terrorism. The tight group of "Neocons" who shaped the foreign policy agenda of the Bush Administration succeeded in shifting the entire spectrum of public discourse sharply to the right, making loyalty to Israel a patriotic duty of every American. 

     I don't have time here describe the way the term "terrorism" has long been manipulated to serve US interests around the globe and the decades-long demonization within the United States of both Islam and the Palestinian struggle.8   But over this past month, Neocons and their supporters who believe the West is engaged in a "clash of civilizations" with Islam, and who have been pushing for a military attack on Iran, have distributed to 28 million homes in key battleground states copies of a fear-inflaming film entitled "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West."  It ties the Palestinian national movement to Hitler, suggests that Palestinians have no legitimate grievances but are instead motivated by a deep anti-Semitism, and makes so-called "Islamofascism" the new Nazism of our time. 9

     This propaganda paradigm has been honed over the past seven years to justify the absolute impunity with which the US and Israel have set aside the rule of law to fight the "war on terror." Both countries have crafted elaborate legal arguments to shore up profoundly illegal practices.  In the United States, White House attorneys wrote secret memos that define torture so narrowly that just about anything can "legally" be done to captives and justified on the grounds of "necessity" and "self-defense."  The secret memos also give the President unlimited power to fight the "war on terror" as he sees fit, freeing the executive branch from the constraints of both domestic and international law.10

     In Israel, after the removal of settlers from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, Israeli attorneys fashioned arguments asserting that Israel was no longer an occupying power and that its 'imposition of economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip is a perfectly legal means of responding to Palestinian attacks.'11  The Israeli High Court earned the rebuke of Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations when it ruled on January 30, 2008 that the government did not violate international law when it sharply reduced the electrical and fuel supply to the million and a half residents of the Gaza Strip, putting it at odds with the International Committee of the Red Cross and United Nations officials. 

     In the words of UN Middle East Envoy Alvaro de Soto, 'Since, as I recall, the test of occupation in international law is effective control of the population, few international lawyers contest the assessment that Gaza remains occupied, with its connections to the outside world by land, sea and air remaining in the hands of Israel.'12

     Both Israel and the US have set aside the Geneva Conventions (which were called 'quaint' by former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales) and behaved as if certain categories of human beings do not deserve human rights.  Both claim to be acting in "self-defense" as they unleash their military might on "preventive" missions, and carry out so-called "targeted killings" of suspected militants, sometimes massacring whole families in the process.  The US military has applied to Iraq urban counterinsurgency techniques leanred from Israel.  Like Israel, it has used massive walls and concrete slabs, checkpoints and razor wire, biometric scanning devices and mandatory ID cards, tanks and D-9 bulldozers, hostage taking and torture, surveillance drones and aerial strikes to control the population.13

     The parallels go on.  The US opened Guantanamo and Israel closed the Gaza Strip with the same aim: to enforce the absolute submission of a captive population.   Both Guantanamo and Gaza under siege have served as laboratories to find the breaking point of human beings by imprisoning people in intense isolation beyond all civilized norms and contact with the outside world, with no end in sight.  Some former Guantanamo detainees have said that they were offered freedom and even US citizenship if they would agree to become informers, while some Gazans have reportedly been told that their access to urgently needed medical care beyond the Gaza Strip depended on their willingness to collaborate with Israel. 

     The prison of Guantanamo and the prison of Gaza have something else in common: they contain large numbers of people who have been subjected to sfystematic torture and abusive treatment, using remarkably similar techniques, including the prolonged use of "stress positions," sleep deprivation, hooding, being held in tiny spaces, being subjected to extremes of heat and cold, beatings, death threats, sexual and other forms of humiliation.
 

The Role of Health Professionals

     From Gaza to Guantanamo, members of the medical profession have been violating their code of ethics. In its 1996 report, "Under Constant Medical Supervision: Torture, Ill-treatment and the Health Professions in Israel and the Occupied Territories," Amnesty International states:

     "Israeli health professionals working with the General Security Service... form part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill-treated and humiliated in ways which place current prison medical practice in conflict with medical ethics... Israeli doctors and paramedics are silent witnesses, participating in a system which denies the physical and mental integrity of the human being which health professionals are bound to uphold."

     Patterns of abusive treatment colluded in by health professionals persisted after the Israeli High Court in September 1999 ostensibly barred the use of torture while creating legal loopholes permitting it to continue.  The Israeli human rights groups B'Tselem, Hamoked and Physicians for Human Rights have all recently denounced the complicity of Israeli doctors in the torture of Palestinians under interrogation.

     As everyone here is aware, the siege has meanwhile taken its own terrible emotional and physical toll.  John Ging, UNRWA's Director of Operations in Gaza, reported at a United Nations Seminar on February 19/20, 2008 that "the devastating impact on the psychology of an entire population could not accurately be measured or conveyed in words."  Apart from groups like the 1,500-member Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, the Israeli medical establishment has remained largely mute as Gazans are denied permits to seek treatment for life-threatening diseases, leading to hundreds of deaths, agonizing uncertainty and prolonged suffering.

     In the United States, Guantanamo has been the focus of a similar battle for the soul of the health professions.  Both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association issued policy statements barring participation in coercive interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere in 2006, but the 150,000-member American Psychological Association (APA) refused at the time to pass a similar resolution, preferring to maintain its lucrative contracts with the Defense Department.

     From the time psychology emerged as a discipline in the United States, psychologists have offered their services to industry and the military.  According to information revealed in Congressional hearings in 1975, psychologists helped the CIA develop a "debility, dependency, dread" model for interrogations which included the use of "stress positions," intense isolation and sensory deprivation to break down prisoners.  This information was included in torture manuals distributed by the CIA to its Latin American allies and made part of the curriculum of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. 14 

     Jane Mayer, in her powerful book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals describes the participation of psychologists in the development of a Department of Defense program that later was taken up by interrogators at Guantanamo and other US-run detention sites.   In the early 1950s, after dozens of American airmen captured during the Korean War were induced to give false public confessions, the Pentagon enlisted psychologists to develop the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program, known as SERE. The North Koreans had used total isolation, water torture, humiliation, enforced nudity, and other kinds of demeaning treatment to elicit the confessions, and SERE was originally designed to help US Special Forces resist this kind of treatment. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, SERE psychologist James Mitchell and other military psychologists reportedly "reverse-engineered" SERE techniques "into a blueprint for abuse." 

     The Pentagon also enlisted the services of one of the country's most successful and best-known psychologists, former APA president Martin Seligman. Professor Seligman, who had developed the theory of "Learned Helplessness" by using electric shocks to destroy the will of dogs to escape from their cages, was invited in early 2002 to speak at the Navy's SERE training school where techniques for "war on terror" interrogations were being developed.

      Soon, psychologists were receiving (secret) CIA contracts to offer their expertise and guidance as part of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) at Guantanamo and in Iraq.  To quote Steven Miles, writing in the American Journal of Bioethics, their job was to give advice on "how to exploit the prisoners' emotional and physical vulnerabilities and how to monitor the success of the interrogation.  BSCT personnel suggested how to stress, coerce and offer incentives in order to secure information."15 The participation of psychologists in such coercive interrogations clearly violates the APA's Code of Ethics, which mandates that psychologists "do no harm," that they respect the basic principles of human rights, and that they be held to a "higher standard of conduct than is required by law."          

     The extent to which some psychologists have deviated from this Code is revealed in a lengthy interview which Swiss journalist Silvia Cattori carried out with Sami El Haj, a Sudanese journalist for Al Jazeera who was released from Guantanamo on May 1, 2008 after being held for more than six years.  He told her that during those years he was interrogated more than 200 times.  He described treatment that appears designed to induce the "learned helplessness" that we now know is part of the current SERE program.  He said he was mostly questioned about Al Jazeera, and that he refused an offer of American citizenship for himself and his family if he agreed to spy on his news service.  He stated:

     "We were under the constant supervision of military psychologists.  They were not there to treat us, but to take part in the interrogations, observing the tortured prisoners so that no detail of their behavior would escape them.  The interrogations were the responsibility of Colonel Morgan, a specialist psychiatric doctor.  He gave instructions to the officers who were torturing us, studied our reactions, then noted every detail in order to be able to adapt the torture techniques to each detainee, which had profound psychological consequences.  I spoke to them.  I told them that the mission of a doctor is an honorable one, to help people, not torture them.  They replied, 'We are military personnel and we must follow the rules.  When an officer gives me an order, it is my duty to carry it out; otherwise I will be imprisoned just like you.  When I signed a contract with the army, I realized at the time that I must obey all orders.'"16   

     On August 16, 2008, I addressed a rally outside the APA's huge Annual Convention in Boston. The demonstration had been organized by a small group of psychologists who were circulating a referendum petition resolving that APA members should not work in places where persons are being held outside of, or in violation of either international law or the US Constitution.   The opposition to the grassroots referendum campaign was quite heated, with even the Defense Department issuing a press release denouncing it. 

     In the view of one of the campaign's organizers, Stephen Soldz, who is both a psychologist and a psychiatrist,     

     "The participation of psychologists at Guantanamo is not simply a professional issue.  It is a major moral challenge for the very concept of using knowledge for good and not for evil.  It this participation continues, psychology will have lost its soul, just as our entire country is in danger of losing its soul as we turn away from these evils being committed in our name."17

     In September 2008, the APA referendum results were announced. The mail-in vote of 15,000 ballots was one of the highest responses on any issue in APA history.  By a majority of 59 percent, participating members called for an end to the involvement of psychologists in abusive interrogations.18

     This welcome stand for human rights by a civil society organization contrasts sharply with the performance of governments.  During the same month, September 2008, the UN annual DPI/NGO conference entitled "Reaffirming Human Rights for All: The Universal Declaration at 60" was held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The report that some 80 counties had followed the lead of the United States and adopted measures since September 11, 2001 that suppressed freedoms and human rights norms made this conference more of a reality check than a celebration.        

     The United Nations got its own reality check when 25-year UN veteran Alvaro de Soto, the UN Under Secretary-General and Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, submitted his "End of Mission Report" in May 2007, followed by his resignation.    Meant to be confidential, the searing 52-page document details how the United States pressured the Quartet not to accept the results of the Palestinian election, and "effectively transformed the Quartet from a negotiation-promoting foursome guided by a common document (the Road Map) into a body that was all-but imposing sanctions on a freely elected government of a people under occupation." He describes how the Quartet, including the United Nations, became "pretty much a group of friends of the US" and began to take positions that "are at odds with UN Security Council resolutions and/or international law." The participation of the UN in the Quartet, he writes, and the Quartet's silence "on Israel's failings and responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention" has caused faith in the UN to be "shaken... There is a seeming reflex, in any given situation where the UN is to take a position, to ask first how Israel or Washington will react rather than what is the right position to take."
 

Building a New Movement for Human Rights

     We may not at present be able to look to the UN as an effective "honest broker" on the Question of Palestine.  We may not today be able to place our faith in European Community and we cannot expect a rapid about turn in US policy, no matter who wins the presidential election.       

     But I do believe a sea change is possible, and I am not here referring to the meltdown of US financial institutions and Arctic glaciers. In the United States there is real reason to hope that significant sections of civil society will, like members of the APA, reject the politics of fear and seek the moral high ground. 

     I work for the civil liberties organization that several years ago sued the government to obtain over 100,000 pages of documents shedding light on the government's abusive treatment of detainees and then brought a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, charging him with responsibility for torture.  Five years ago there were only a handful of organizations that would stand up with us in opposition to the Bush Administration.  That is swiftly changing, and the more that is made public about our government's secret practices over the last seven years, the greater the revulsion is bound to be.  The opportunity is at hand for us to create a new constituency for human rights by drawing parallels between US and Israeli actions today, and drawing strength from the anti-Apartheid movement of the last century.

     The close historic ties binding Israel and Apartheid South Africa in a "unique alliance" that Israeli Professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has called "the most comprehensive and the most serious Israeli involvement anywhere in the world" explain why anti-apartheid activists and leaders in South Africa are now in the forefront of a rapidly growing international campaign against Israeli Apartheid. 19 In Nelson Mandela's words, "We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of Palestinians."20

     I have written elsewhere about these close connections and the various ways the Apartheid analogy has been used to draw parallels between Apartheid South Africa and Israel over the past two decades.21 Apartheid was applied to Israeli practices long before Jimmy Carter created a furor by calling his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. 

     Today in our solidarity work in the United States, we have created an extensive exhibit illustrating how the "inhuman acts" contained in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid apply practically in their entirety to what Israel is doing to Palestinians, including the transformation of Gaza into an impoverished and imprisoned Bantustan.  The Convention, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in November 1973, emphasized that the "crime of apartheid" -- which it defined as a "crime against humanity" -- was NOT exclusive to South Africa, but applied to policies and practices "similar" to those identified with the Apartheid state.  Significantly, the demise of Apartheid in South Africa did not lead the international community to abandon this universalized application of the term.  The 2002 Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which has been ratified by 102 countries, includes the "crime of apartheid" as one of eleven recognized crimes against humanity.

     The abysmal lack of action by nation states following the July 2004 International Court of Justice ruling on Israel's West Bank Wall has given both moral authority and momentum to an international movement for "boycott, divestment and sanctions" (BDS) as perhaps the only remaining meaningful non-violent method of working for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

     On the first anniversary of the ICJ Wall opinion, 171 Palestinian civil society organizations issued an urgent call to the international community and "conscientious Israelis" for boycotts, divestment and sanctions to be imposed on Israel until it ends its occupation and complies with international law and universal principles of human rights.  The way this call is being responded to by a broad range of international civil society organizations -- including churches, trade unions, writers, universities and advocacy groups -- gives us reason to hope that this is a movement which can, in time, exert significant pressure.  Just the threat that Israel may face isolation and pariah status appears to be having an impact, judging from the outcry the Campaign against Israeli Apartheid is generating within the United States and Israel.

     If human rights are to have a future, former UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard  (himself a South African jurist) warned us, Palestine must become the moral issue of the 21^st century, much as the fight against Apartheid in South Africa was the moral issue of the closing decades of the 20^th.   This is our task, and it is achievable.  Let me close with these words of Mahatma Gandhi:   "Strength does not come from physical capacity.  It comes from an indomitable will."  If those of us working in solidarity can mirror the endurance and indomitable will possessed by Palestinians under occupation, we will together be a force that cannot be stopped.

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** Read Nancy Murray's "Dynamics of Resistance: the Apartheid Analogy" beginning on page 132 of this journal.

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