Grenada 17 says US torture of POWs not new
by Leroy Noel
Monday, June 28, 2004
ST GEORGE‘S, Grenada: The 17 persons
convicted in Grenada for the death of former Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and
several of his cabinet colleagues say reports of the humiliation and torture
of prisoners of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, by their US
military captors are nothing new. A statement
from the Grenada 17 says official US spokespersons have sought to portray
these horrible abuses as recent, isolated incidents by out-of-control
individual soldiers, and not the result of official US policy but those who
lived through the US invasion of Grenada know the truth.
The prisoners added that in the months following the October 1983 US invasion
of Grenada, 2,800 Grenadians out of a total adult population of 60,000 were
detained, most of them at a prisoner of war camp set up at Point Salines
International Airport. Many of the prisoners were kept in small ‘sweat boxes’
designed so that they had to crawl on hands, knees and stomachs like dogs in
order to get in and out. The Grenada 17
indicated that guard-dogs were set halfway into the sweat boxes to terrorize
them; abuse, including racist abuse, was screamed at them day and night by the
soldiers; and the boxes were constantly beaten at night so as to deprive the
detainees of sleep. They were kept in those boxes on the asphalt tarmac for
days or weeks, in the sun, in the stifling daytime heat. Leaks in the boxes
let in the heavy October night rains, so that they shivered in their wet
clothes night after night, many becoming ill they claimed.
The committee for the defense of the Grenada 17 says former members of the
Grenadian government and senior military officers were especially ill-treated
including former Deputy Prime Minister, a civilian, after being taken prisoner
was forced to lie face down in oil, in an ants nest and animal dung. His wife,
a Jamaican citizen and junior minister for Women’s Affairs, the sole female
POW taken onto the US warships, was made to strip naked there in front of
non-medical military personnel on the pretext of being given a ‘medical
examination’ – something that was not done to the male POW’s on the ship.
The committee added that black plastic bags
were placed over the heads of the three most senior Grenadian military
officers, to half-stifle them. Former ministers of the Grenadian government
were deliberately humiliated by being publicly paraded half-naked, blindfolded
and manacled; video film and photographs of them were shown around the world.
All of the above is in violation of international law as regards the treatment
of prisoners of war. Glen St. Louis of the
committee for defense of the Grenada 17 says in early and mid-November 1983
and again in February 1984, a series of tortures of the 17 prisoners took
place so as to force ‘confessions of murder’ out of them in the context of the
Cold War, the US government was determined to permanently crush the Grenada
revolution because of its close ties to its socialist enemy, Cuba.
He believes the easiest method of achieving
this was to eliminate Grenadian leaders who might oppose foreign control of
their country by having them charged, convicted and executed for the tragic
death of popular Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and others. The problem was
that no evidence existed that Prime Minister Bishop’s killing was planned,
ordered or carried out in cold blood. It soon became obvious, therefore that
convictions could only be obtained through ‘confessions’ of guilt. So the
Americans appointed a proxy team of Barbadian police to ‘investigate’ the
deaths of the Grenadian Prime Minister and others.
Mr. St. Louis claimed the Barbadian police
then obtained several false ‘confessions’ through the use of torture and from
1983-86 the most vicious propaganda campaign the Caribbean has ever
experienced was carried out by the US psychological operations battalion,
branding Grenada’s surviving leaders as ‘criminals and murderers’. A since
published book by a leading American investigative journalist, Bob Woodward,
Veil: The Secret Wars of the USA, has revealed that following the United
Nations’ condemnation of the invasion of Grenada, then US President Ronald
Reagan authorised several millions of US dollars to the CIA ‘for propaganda to
justify the US invasion’.
After the November tortures an outcry went
up from the prisoners’ families, and an investigation by a senior police
officer from Dominica was set up. To this day that Investigator’s report has
never been published. In 1986, 14 of the
Grenada 17 were convicted of murder and 3 of manslaughter, largely on the
basis of several false confessions obtained under torture for the ‘evidence’
against them was full of contradictions and, in the case of the political
leadership, patently untrue; while some of the soldiers convicted were not
even shown to have been involved in any way! Yet the gallows was immediately
erected; only the thousands of protests from all over the world, including
from several dozen members of the US Congress itself, averted the prepared
executions St. Louis concluded.
How easily false confessions can be obtained
by the use of force, in a situation of overwhelming power by a captor, has
recently been shown through an article in the London Guardian newspaper, which
revealed that with respect to three of five British citizens recently released
from the US Guantanamo Bay camp ‘after three months in solitary confinement
they admitted attending a meeting between Osama Bin Laden and Mohamed Ata, the
leader of the September 11th hijackers – despite having been in Britain at the
time! The US military believed their alibis only when (the British) MI5 proved
that the men could not have been present’.
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