Is there a cure for Gitmo?
Today is the sixth anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Down from a high of over 500, some 275 detainees remain, some of them because the U.S. is unable to find any country that will take them in.
Fittingly, in a cruel sense, an appellate federal court dismissed Rasul v. Rumsfeld today, as if to mark the anniversary. Shafiq Rasul was a lead plaintiff in Rasul v. Bush, the case, filed weeks after Gitmo opened, that won a Supreme Court ruling that detainees are entitled to legal proceedings in 2004. In the present case, Rasul and three other British citizens allege that they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques in the Guantánamo Bay camp that violate international and federal law.
Meanwhile, a recent Times article says that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan has a significantly larger prisoner population than Gitmo, with similar frustrations for those who would reduce and ultimately close the base. Early in the Afghan conflict, Bagram developed a reputation as a secretive place where beatings and other harsh interrogation techniques were common place; two men died in Bagram in 2002, including one whose legs had been beaten so severely as to more or less destroy the muscle tissue. Bagram has expanded fivefold since then, in part because of the decision not to send new detainees to Gitmo. The American Red Cross recently complained that “dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram.”
As much as I know that no one wants to give an honest answer (except perhaps Mitt Romney), I do wish that we could have an discussion of what candidates will do about Guantánamo. As things stand, there is no reason to think that a post-O’Connor Supreme Court will finally rule that detainees have habeas corpus rights, no reason to think that anyone will ever be held accountable for torture in the facility (and that we as a nation will be held to our commitments under international law), and no reason to think that Gitmo is the only Gitmo. Unless we have a president who takes a strong line against extralegal detention and torture, I could see this being a problem that is with us for much of the next decade.
Poetic imagination in play, I imagine KBR building new facilities on the Crawford property. Lots of folks to clear brush.
That albatross will be around our national neck for a long time. I don't think there is a cure. No other nation is dumb enough to accept the inmates.
Sensible would be releasing the majority, with assimilation assistance, or repatriation assistance if the home country accepts them, and incorporation into US prisons for those who can be adjudicated.
January 12, 2008 10:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sensible would be releasing the majority, with assimilation assistance, or repatriation assistance if the home country accepts them
It's an odd dilemma that the administration sometimes finds itself in. I take it to be a genuine concern on the part of whoever is in charge of repatriation that they not send detainees back to places where they will be tortured - thus, several Uighurs were kept long past the time they could have been released because the US didn't want to send them back to China, where they would probably have received brutal treatment by the government, which wishes to keep a tight clamp on Uighur separatism in the Chinese west.
But I take the reports of brutal treatment at Gitmo to be fairly credible - the testimony I've heard is similar across former detainees, etc. In the latest issue of Harper's (I think it's not online yet), Clive Stafford Smith says that one of his clients there was tortured in Morocco before being sent to the camp, where he was subjected to round-the-clock, high decibel rock music - the detainee preferred captivity where his penis had been sliced open because he felt the techniques used in Gitmo were driving him insane.
January 12, 2008 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, but the concern for the Uygurs was transparently fake, since they were eventually delivered to Albania. They just wanted the problem to go away.
You'll find many war supporters still worrying about what to do with inmates ("detainees"). But they assume the detention was both necessary and humane, and only worry about the future of people no one wants, and with whom we might be stuck forever.
There is no way to call stress enhancement humane, even if bloodless. It's torture, or it would not be employed.
As a general question regarding force, both soldiers and police tend to be both fond of the work and confident in their conclusions. This is both unavoidable and necessary, in that we want enthusiastic performance. But we should not expect them to at the same time be circumspect about issues like tactics and the possible innocence of suspects.
Therefore we have to also have surpervision and adversary counsel. Excess and abuse will of course occur; it is inherent in the system. When one is sure of a suspect's guilt one will tend to get coercive. When one is sure of the value of a war goal one will get excessive with ordinance, etc.
Irrational would be to expect the same person that is eager to enforce also be cautious and humane. Both his personal view and that of his colleagues will not tolerate hesitation.
January 12, 2008 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I vaguely remember what you are talking about with the Uighurs going to Albania, but what is the connection there that makes it transparently fake?
I guess, of course, both could be true. Regardless of whether anybody in the chain of command really cared about them, if I was a Uighur picked up in Afghanistan, the last thing I'd want is to be repatriated.
January 12, 2008 10:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess I would not want to be dumped in the mountains there now, but before being swept up they were presumably doing OK. avoiding the attention of both Pasthuns and Han Chinese.
When I said concern was fake, I mean why not invite them into the US? We eventually brought some Hmong here.
January 13, 2008 8:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
In reading the Times article on the camp at Bagram in Afghanistan, I feared that closing Guantanamo could provide a way to get that issue off the political map while we send prisoners to a site farther out of site, out of mind. The issue in campaigns and put to candidates needs to be the existence of all such camps of such proportions where rights are ignored, not just the whether Guantanamo remains open.
In an indirectly related matter, the last officer convicted of abuse at Abu Ghraib (sp?) has had his conviction thrown out by a military court (with one small matter remaining as a reprimand). Now, he himself said that officers were involved, if not implicated, but maintains his own innocence. But the point here is that no officers are being held accountable for what happened there. No one is going to be accountable for any untoward events at Bagram, either. At least most people are aware of Guantanamo and that implies a little pressure on Congress to keep an eye on it. How many members of Congress and how many candidates want to bring up concerns about Bagram?
January 12, 2008 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says to the press that he'd like to see Gitmo closed:
And, in echoes of the days when Gitmo was used to house Haitian refugees, in slightly better conditions than today, the article says:
Is this perhaps planning for a post-Castro Cuba?
January 15, 2008 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink