An old friend of mine, who spent some time in a mental hospital because of some drug issues as a teenager, said something a long time ago that’s reverberating in my head today: The thing about nuthouses is, if you’re not crazy when you go in, you are when you come out.
Last month, the military was telling us that the hunger strike at Guantánamo was diminishing, that it had peaked on September 11 last hear, when 131 prisoners were refusing food, and was now down to only 22 prisoners. They didn’t know why most prisoners had stopped refusing to eat. According to today’s New York Times, the number of hunger strikers is now down to only four. But there’s a good reason for that. Eating is not exactly voluntary. Guards have begun strapping detainees into "restraint chairs" like the one pictured to the left, using riot-control soldiers to keep them still (no details on that), and forcing long plastic tubes down their nasal passages and into their stomachs. The tubes are inserted and removed so violently that prisoners bleed and pass out. Too much food is put in the tubes, which causes prisoners to defecate on themselves.
If you’re strapped into a "padded cell on wheels," while a tube is forced down your nose, that means you’re no longer refusing meals.
A spokesman for the prison said that the force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner." I think that might just trump Duncan Hunter’s Guantánamo menu recital for the most absurd thing ever said about the treatment of prisoners. Yes, we abuse people, but we do it nicely.
After you read the NYT article, to put it in context, go read the series on Guantánamo in the current National Journal. It’s been obvious for a long time that many of the people caught up in the American gulag, or farmed out to its subsidiaries, were not monsters determined to kill Americans, but ordinary people — victims of mistaken identity or vendettas, people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, prisoners who were simply sold for substantial amounts of money, or even people whose names were coughed up by others under torture. What wasn’t clear is how common these gross errors were.
Corine Hegland’s articles make the matter somewhat clearer. Analyzing 132 government files on prisoners who have filed habaes corpus petitions, and heavily redacted transcripts of 314 tribunals for Guantánamo prisoners, she found that fewer than half were even accused of fighting against the United States or its allies, and that fewer than 20 percent have ever been al-Qaeda members. Only 8 men were tied to plans for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan. Eight. And two of those eight were released, and face no charges at home.
Any error that costs someone his freedom is unacceptable, but this isn’t a matter of a few rare errors. It looks like the innocent, lacking guile and connections, are more likely to be imprisoned than the guilty.
This is insane: A 17-year-old Yemeni teacher, Farouq Ali Ahmed, working in Afghanistan, is warned to get out of the country quickly, because it is no longer a safe place for Arabs. He escapes to Pakistan, without stopping in Kabul to pick up his passport. In Pakistan, he’s handed over to American forces. Being a foreigner without a passport is all the reason needed to send him to Guantánamo. Once he’s there, another prisoner swears he saw him at Osama bin Laden’s private airport, toting an AK-47. That other prisoner seems to make a habit of lying about Yemeni prisoners. He’s claimed to have seen many of them in places they could not possibly have been. But his word — and the fact that, under torture, Mohamed al-Kahtani pointed to Farouq’s picture — is enough to keep the now 22-year-old prisoner at Guantánamo.
The "evidence" against other prisoners is equally ludicrous. A sarcastic "OK, I saw bin Laden five times" at the end of a long interrogation turns up as an admission of guilt. Wearing a model of watch that has a circuit board that has been used for bombs serves as evidence against nine prisoners. Never mind that the watch is sold all over the world. Wear a Casio? Welcome to the gulag.
Suicide looks like a rational response to this nightmare.
In addition to the information about the prisoners, the article told me something intriguing about the lawyers who represent them. It’s not surprising: Initially, they assumed their prospective clients were guilty. They took cases because they believed in due process. Even monsters are entitled to their day in court. What they have learned about those prisoners gave them a deeper understanding of the importance of their work. If monsters aren’t entitled to all the benefits of the law, it becomes very, very easy to deny those benefits to the innocent as well. And unless the law is allowed to work its magic, there’s no way to know the difference. It’s not theory any more.
If we’ve learned anything over the past five years, it ought to be that the importance of due process isn’t just a nice thought for good times. The fact that in its absence the innocent will suffer is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by what has happened at Guantánamo and other military detention sites. And now it should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the lack of due process has nothing to do with the nature of the detainees, but the nature of the people who are holding them. Detainees’ lawyers are convinced that the abuse of the hunger strikers is a direct result of the Graham amendment, which cuts prisoners off from access to the courts.
They do this, and God only knows what else, because they know they can.
