TIMING IS EVERYTHING. In Washington this Friday – 9/11 as it happens – there will be a reception to say farewell to Geoff Loane, the veteran Irish aid worker who has handled one of the most politically-charged portfolios in the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Over the past five-and-a-half years, this included Guantánamo Bay and all that went with it.
As head of the ICRC’s regional delegation for the United States and Canada, he paid the first of many visits to Guantánamo Bay in May 2004, just as an ICRC report was leaked to the press describing the torture and abuse of detainees held there. News of the Abu Ghraib horror show also broke that summer. The hate mail to Loane followed quickly as the ICRC became a much derided entity in some right-wing circles.
Few people outside the aid community have heard of Loane and he works for an organisation which is the soul of discretion, sometimes to a tragic fault, as the ICRC has confessed over its silence on Hitler’s concentration camps for which the organisation issued a tardy apology for “moral failures” in 1995.
Confidentiality is the ICRC’s calling card as the committee goes about the tasks ascribed to it by the 60-year-old laws of war or Geneva Conventions: to provide assistance and protection to victims of conflict.
He oversaw the preparation of the report which set off a media firestorm in April this year when it was leaked by persons unknown, two years after it was first submitted by Loane to the CIA in February 2007. The 43-page ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody lays bare in chilling detail just what Dick Cheney meant by the “tough, mean, dirty, nasty business” of keeping the United States safe in a post 9/11 world.
After clinical descriptions of various methods of ill-treatment, such as water boarding, prolonged stress standing, beatings, confinement in a box, prolonged nudity and shackling, sleep and food deprivation, Loane and his colleagues concluded that the treatment of these high-value detainees such as the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, “constituted torture”. Open access to these detainees who had been hidden in prisons on three continents for up to four years in some cases, did not come easily. In February 2005, Loane and the ICRC president, Jakob Kellenberger, met for 45 minutes in the Oval Office with President Bush. The meeting was a key moment in the ICRC’s overall strategy to persuade the Bush administration that the Geneva Conventions did apply to all those detained in the Americans’ “War on Terror”.
The ICRC humanitarian agenda finally won the support of the US Supreme Court when it ruled in June 2006 that, contrary to Bush’s view, common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of those affected by conflict did in fact extend to those detained in the “War on Terror”.
Bush followed this up on September 6th, 2006 by sending the 14 “suspected terrorist leaders and operatives” held overseas by the CIA to Guantánamo Bay, thus admitting their existence for the first time, and paving the way for ICRC to visit them and document their treatment. On the same day, the US department of defence launched its new Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations. In explicit terms, it bans the use of many of the techniques which the Red Cross complained of in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the CIA prisons, including water boarding, use of hoods, duct tape over the eyes, any form of physical pain and mock executions.
That was a victory of sorts for the ICRC and international humanitarian law. This was subsequently reinforced by President Obama’s announcement on his first day in office that the CIA’s secret prisons would be closed and the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” would no longer be used.
On Obama’s watch, prosecutions may follow.
Before Loane fetched up in Washington, the Tipperary man had already clocked up 13 years in east Africa, where he worked in Ethiopia during the Mengistu years, and in Somalia, where he made his reputation as one of the great logisticians of the aid business.
At the height of the Somali famine and civil war in 1992, he masterminded a strategy to keep one million people alive each day through a network of 1,000 community kitchens supported by 20 ships, a fleet of Hercules aircraft and hundreds of trucks. Behind the scenes he negotiated with all sides to the conflict to ensure access to all those affected by the fighting.
Now, as he settles into a renovated gospel hall in the Kent countryside with his 16-year-old daughter Meskerem, he is starting a new chapter heading up ICRC’s London office. He regrets unfinished business in Somalia, where war and famine continue to threaten the population, but he takes some comfort from the fact that the number of detainees at Guantánamo has dropped from 860 to 230 during the years of ICRC’s engagement there and the prison regime is now “more open and transparent”.