by hilzoy
From the NYT, h/t Matt Yglesias, comes an article entitled: "Military Taking a Tougher Line With Detainees". Really.
"Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.
The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview."
Except, of course, for the ones who aren't: the NYT article mentions that about 100 of the detainees at Guantanamo have been cleared for release, and the National Journal's review of available documents revealed this:
"Some of the men Rumsfeld described -- the terrorists, the trainers, the financiers, and the battlefield captures -- are indeed at Guantanamo. But National Journal's detailed review of government files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, didn't turn up very many of them. Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world.Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars."
Back to the NYT:
"Since spring 2004, the military’s handling of the detainees had been heavily influenced by the political and diplomatic pressures that grew out of the Abu Ghraib scandal and other cases of prisoner abuse. At the same time, Guantánamo’s focus was shifting from interrogations to the long-term detention of men who, for the most part, would never be charged with any crime.With little guidance from Washington, senior officers here began in 2005 to edge back toward the traditional Geneva Convention rules for prisoner treatment that President Bush had disavowed after 9/11 for the fight against terrorism, military officials said. Military officers began listening more attentively to the prisoners’ complaints, and eventually met a few times with a council of detainee leaders.
Those talks were quickly aborted in August 2005. The hunger strikes were effectively broken last January, when the military began strapping detainees into padded “restraint chairs” to force-feed them through stomach tubes.
But those protests gave way to several drug overdoses in May and the hangings in June of three prisoners — all of whom had previously been hunger strikers.
The current Guantánamo commanders eschewed any criticism of their predecessors. But they were blunt in laying out a different approach.
Asked about his discussions with prisoners, Colonel Dennis said he basically had none. As for the handful of detainees who have continued to wage hunger strikes, including three who were being force-fed last week, he said they would get no “special attention” from him.
“If they want to do that, hook it up,” he said, apparently referring to the restraint chair system for force-feeding. “If that’s what you want to do, that’s your choice.”"
Two notes. First, the World Medical Association's Declaration of Tokyo, which is accepted by the American Medical Association, prohibits physicians from engaging in force feeding:
"Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially. The decision as to the capacity of the prisoner to form such a judgment should be confirmed by at least one other independent physician. The consequences of the refusal of nourishment shall be explained by the physician to the prisoner."
Force feeding is a form of involuntary treatment, and it is wrong; as is the creation of conditions likely to drive people to suicide.
Second, note this sentence from the NYT: "At the same time, Guantánamo’s focus was shifting from interrogations to the long-term detention of men who, for the most part, would never be charged with any crime." There are no plans to bring most of the detainees to trial. There are no plans to file charges against them. They are just being locked up. Moreover, any intelligence value that any of them might ever have had is presumably way past its expiration date. We are holding hundreds of people, many of whom are innocent, indefinitely; insofar as part of the problem is that we have no idea what to do with them, it's hard to see when they might ever be released.
One last quote from the NYT:
"Military officials confirmed that since the suicides in June, three detainees who were part of the council that negotiated with military commanders had been kept isolated from nearly all other prisoners in Camp Echo, a collection of bungalows where detainees often see their lawyers.Those detainees include Shaker Aamer, a Saudi resident of Britain who is accused of having ties to Al Qaeda; Ghassan al-Sharbi, a Saudi electrical engineer who was charged earlier with plotting to make bombs for Qaeda forces in Afghanistan; and Saber Lahmar, an Algerian religious scholar seized in Bosnia.
Lawyers for Mr. Aamer and Mr. Lahmar said that they had been alone for most of that time, and that the isolation was causing them psychological damage.
“They have thrown away the key and forgotten him even though he is spiraling down physically and psychologically,” Mr. Lahmar’s lawyer, Stephen H. Olesky, said.
Noting that a petition for relief on behalf of Mr. Lahmar has been before a federal appeals court for nearly two years, he added, “They know we do not have a judge to take this case to, so they can pile on the detainee.”
Colonel Dennis, the commander of the detention group, said Mr. Lahmar was being allowed to exercise and had access to any medical attention he required."
Human beings are not like tigers or panda bears, who normally live alone. We're social animals. We go crazy in isolation. We break apart, and once we break, we can never be made as good as new.
This is so shameful.
This has been stuck in my head a lot lately:
"My greatest fear was that the Bush administration would simply forget about the prisoners, in the vain hope the world would too. In time, the country would turn its attention elsewhere. Eventually, the prisoners would settle into the mind-numbing routine that characterizes prison life everywhere. Nameless and faceless, lost to a world that would gradually grow indifferent, the men and boys at Camp Delta would be left, in the words of Albert Camus, to 'drift through life rather than live, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories'."
--Joseph Margulies, Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, p. 131.
Posted by: Katherine | December 17, 2006 at 03:04 AM
Shame
It is a cramped little state with no foreign policy. Ok, a once-great nation with no sane foreign policy.
Posted by: rilkefan | December 17, 2006 at 03:15 AM
Katherine, I hope you won't think I'm making light of the situaton when I say that I read your quote and then immediately heard in my mind's ear Arlo Guthrie saying "But when we got to the station, there was a third possibility we hadn't even counted upon..."
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | December 17, 2006 at 03:50 AM
Not offended but don't get the connection either. Is that from Alice's Restaurant?
Posted by: Katherine | December 17, 2006 at 08:39 AM
On a semi-related note, Maher Arar remains on the US terrorist watch list:
It is true that O'Connor didn't know everything in the US file. But I'm pretty sure that the 'evidence' to which Wilkins refers, to the extent that it exists at all, consists of false confessions that two other Canadian citizens made while being tortured in Syria.
Posted by: Katherine | December 17, 2006 at 08:58 AM
I suppose it's bad form to simply link a http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/12/o_the_irony/index.php#040772>comment at another forum, but I really have to run.
Posted by: CharleyCarp | December 17, 2006 at 09:59 AM
Yes, Katherine. "Now friends, there was only one of two things Officer Olby could have done. The first was to give us a medal for being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very honest and we didn't we expect it, and the second was to bawl us out and tell us never to be seen hauling garbage in the vicinity again, which is what we expected. But when we got to the police station, there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested - handcuffed, and I said, 'Olby, I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on' and he said, 'Shut up, kid, and get in the back of the patrol car', and that's what we did."
It occurs to me that Alice's Restaurant is actually quite a good preview of this war and occupation.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh | December 17, 2006 at 10:55 AM
This is super:
The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
...
The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.
Posted by: Ugh | December 18, 2006 at 08:15 AM
Guantanamo must be that famous Authoritarian Libertarianism the conservatives are always defending.
Pinochet would be proud.
Posted by: SomeOtherDude | December 18, 2006 at 09:27 AM