Guantanamo
From American Gulag
A Tale Of Two Prisons
By Katie Lampe
Contents |
[edit] Introduction
A year ago, Chris Arendt was a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, working the night shift and dispensing toilet paper to the detainees while keeping a sharp eye out for iguanas and other rare species who lived outside its walls.
“Don’t mess with the iguanas,” Arendt told the New Internationalist Magazine. “In Guantanamo there is a $10,000 fine for killing one.” [1]
Today Arendt is 19 and travels internationally with former prisoner Mozzam Begg speaking about the injustices, absurdities and contradictions of their lives at Guantanamo on both sides of the wire, as guard and detainee.
“We used to drive around terrified of running over these things; but people would beat the shit out of detainees. We could act like fools on the block, but mess with an iguana and it’s a different story,” Arendt said. “They’re a protected species; detainees are not. I’m telling you the whole place is nuts.”
Guantanamo was built on a collective fear that to protect the American civilians from future terrorist attacks it was necessary to keep the most dangerous enemy combatants in an offshore prison. These detainees “are the worst of a very bad lot,” Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News back in 2002. “They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans.”[2]
For the next seven years, Bush officials maintained a tightly controlled narrative that Guantanamo was a safe, humane and professional detention operation that provided valuable information on the war on terrorism.
However, from the first pictures printed on the cover of the UK Daily Mirror depicting prisoners in hoods, shackles and orange jumpsuits, a counter narrative emerged. Initially, the critical narrative was weak because the Bush administration carefully controlled all information out of Guantanamo. Gradually, leaked documents and detainee testimonies alleging abuse unraveled the Bush administration’s assertions and fueled a strong opposition.
[edit] Background
After the September 11th attack, former President George W. Bush signed an executive order stating the United States military could indefinitely detain any non-citizen who he believed was involved in terrorism. The United States Department of Justice determined Guantanamo Bay to be outside of US jurisdiction, and began moving prisoners captured in Afghanistan there January 11, 2002. [3]
“These are not lawful combatants,” Vice President Dick Cheney explained at the time, “They are not prisoners of the law.”[4]
The first 20 suspected terrorists arrived at Camp X-Ray, a temporary facility, wearing bright orange jumpsuits, hand and foot shackles, gloves and hoods covered by blacked out goggles. The iconic pictures taken that day—one of the few candid shots to surface in the history of the prison—show the detainees kneeling on gravel, heads bowed towards chain linked fence and barbed wire.
“They had set up these cages, you really can’t describe them as anything more than that, like an oversized dog kennel,” Scott Higham, a reporter for the Washington Post described in a phone interview. He visited Guantanamo “multiple times” in first few years it was opened.
“It had razor wire that ran around it and a bunch of lights that they propped up very quickly. It had corrugated sheets of tin to cover the cells and a hole in the ground to go the bathroom. That was about it. It looked like they had built this facility in a matter of weeks,” Higham said.
Within a year the government erected a permanent maximum-security prison to replace the open aired cages and concrete floors. The new facility, Camp Delta, was meticulously designed to be the perfect interrogation facility. From the location, design and day-to-day operations, the facility was built to serve this goal. [5] Camp Delta, and the six other prisons build after, became the indefinite home for hundreds of “enemy combatants” stuck in a legal limbo.
[edit] Reporter's Challenge
Uncertainty and fear leading up to the Iraq war stifled any initial attempt by major news sources or human rights group to question the legality and ethics of holding detainees indefinitely in an offshore prison. As with all fronts of the war on terror, citing national security, the United Sates government quietly clamped down on most forms of communication with the media regarding Guantanamo Bay except official briefings from the White House, Pentagon and planned media tours.
Media tours, which involve a guided walk through of selected facilities and scheduled interviews with limited personnel, became tightly monitored and have been described as choreographed routines.
Carol Rosenberg is a reporter of the Miami Herald. She is the only reporter to cover Guantanamo full time since its opening. In her first year she went on over 100 media tours before she stopped counting.
“People know when you are coming in advance,” Rosenberg said, “Schedules get posted, things get put away, setup, moved…”
On the media tours, reporters are only shown the “humane” and “culturally sensitive” side of Guantanamo including the kitchen where detainees are served three culturally appropriate meals a day and the state of the art medical facility.
“We called it the dog pony show,” Higham said, “They don’t answer any hard questions. … A lot of times they’d pretend to not hear you.”
According to Guantanamo Bay ground rules, reporters cannot talk to interrogators or guards without permission and are forbidden from communicating with or identifying prisoners, or audio recording remarks. Photos of guards and prisoners can only be taken from the neck down or from behind. “Even then, everything is censored before you leave” Rosenberg said.
There are no individuals at Guantanamo; instead of names, both prisoners and guards use numbers.[6]
Rosenberg recalled an interaction she had with detainee number 766. She was with a photographer from The Miami Herald and a Guantanamo guard.
“He walked right up to the fence,” she said, “He pointed to the cameraman and asked me if we were with National Geographic.”
According to the ground rules Rosenberg could not engage the detainee, so she faced the Guard and said, “Please tell him I’m not trying to be rude, but I cannot answer.”
Rosenberg recognized the prisoner as Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee captured in Afghanistan by American troops at 15 for allegedly killing an American soldier with a grenade in 2002.[7]
“He is unbelievably tall,” Rosenberg said, “but you can tell he is just a boy.”
The ground rules imposed by the military prevented Rosenberg from mentioning she even saw Khadr at Guatanamo.
During the first few years of Guantanamo, the absence of media accounts of individual experiences or distinguishing pictures perpetuated the stereotypical image of terrorist to all detainees in the prison.[8] The faceless detainee, shackled hand to food, crouched in an orange jumpsuit was not a human. To many who believed the Bush administration’s accounts it was the uncomfortable and feared image of an assumed terrorist; guilty until proven innocent. For others, the image was the uncomfortable reminder of how much the public didn’t know regarding the treatment of detainees inside the wire.
“They tried to create a prison camp where these people weren’t people. It was hard to cover as a reporter,” Rosenberg said.
With no access to detainees and limited access to guards, Rosenberg resorted to stories about policy, numbers, and infrastructure.
“I went on so many media tours I would start to detect changes and then write about them.” Guards rotate roughly every six months. Rosenberg jokes that she and the detainees are the only people that have been at Guantanamo from the start.
The initial lack of human-interest stories created a disconnect between the American public and interest in Guantanamo. Rosenberg said her initial readership was small.
[edit] Conflicting Narratives
It wasn’t until the prisoners gained access to lawyers that “enemy combatants” gained a voice and an alternative narrative emerged. Lawyers are the only non-governmental group with direct access to detainees, and the only individuals who can tell their story.
Candace Gorman, a 25-year civil rights attorney, shut down her practice in Chicago to defend two detainees at Guantanamo. She started working with her clients in 2005 and has met with them over 20 times.
“It is frustrating, challenging, and disgusting the way the courts have fallen apart,” she said in a phone interview.
Gorman meets with her clients at Guantanamo’s Camp Echo, a cluster of huts formerly used for interrogating detainees. “When I arrive at Camp Echo, my client is already sitting in a chair at a table and his feet are shackled to the floor,” Gorman said.
Both of her clients speak English, so she meets with them one on one, without a translator.
“There are cameras in the room pointed directly on us. They are supposed to have the sound off, but none of us ever feel comfortable with the military abiding by that court order,” she said.
According to Gorman the information she learns from her client is pretty much the same as what the military learns in its own investigations. The importance is not to discover new information, it’s to provide justice for humans who do not have rights and a voice for humans who do not have a way to be heard.
“We can just keep them forever thinking that they might do something bad. If they are not guilty of anything we should let them go free. If we have turned them into terrorists, shame on us,” she said.
Inmate 261, Jumah Al Dosseri, was one of the first detainee cases to raise awareness of the sexual degradation, torture, forced drugging and religious persecution at Guantanamo. His lawyer, Joshia Colangelo-Bryan, brought the story to light.
The American military picked up Al Dossari thinking he was a recruiter for al Qaeda. When all evidence fell through, the government maintained that Al Dossari was al Qaeda purely based places he had traveled: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Azerbaijan and the Pakistan border. At Al Dossari’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal, to determine whether or not he was an enemy combatant, the presiding officer had no evidence that Al Dossari ever fought in these places or had any connection to Al Qaeda, just that he had recently traveled to these locations. [9]
Al Dossari stayed five years at Guantanamo, three of them in solitary confinement, until he was set free to Saudi Arabia with no charges. [10] In an interview with NPR’s This American Life, Colangelo-Bryan, refers to a leaked copy of Al Dossari’s testimony which accuses interrogators of electro-shocking Al Dossari, forcing him to the ground and urinating on him, grabbing his genitals, wiping what appeared to be menstrual blood on him, and dumping a steaming cup of hot tea on his head. [11]
During one meeting between Al Dossari and Colangelo-Bryan, Dossari asked Colangelo-Bryan to step out of the room to use the restroom. Five minutes later, Colangelo-Bryan found him hanging form a homemade noose with one wrist slit.
Colangelo-Bryan told NPR, Al Dossari did not want to kill himself without an outside witness because he feared if he died nobody would ever know what really happened. [12]
Suicide is not uncommon at Guantanamo and officials go to great lengths to downplay these acts of “asymmetrical warfare.” In 2006 after one of multiple reported staged suicide sprees, reporters were prevented from entering Guantanamo. Rosenberg covered the story but had to rely only on official sources. [13]
“…It’s important that the information that is coming from Guantanamo be delivered by the independent news media and not by the Pentagon,” Rosenberg said in an interview with the Miami Herald. [14]
As the government releases more detainees, more narratives surface depicting blatant human rights abuses that contradict the Bush administration’s promise of a safe and humane facility. Further evidence also shows the Bush administration not only misled the public about prisoner’s treatment, but also lied about who prisoners were and how they were picked up. In a 2003 press conference with former British Prime Minster Tony Blair, Bush explained the selection process for detainees: “Let me just say, these were illegal combatants. They were picked up off the battlefield aiding and abetting the Taliban.” [15]
Seven years later in a press conference Cheney said, “The people that are there are people we picked up on a battlefield primarily in Afghanistan. They’re terrorists. They’re bomb makers, they’re facilitators of terror, they’re members of al Qaeda, the Taliban.” [16]
But, a 2005 Associated Press article concludes that Afghan tribesmen turned over the majority of U.S. detainees in return for large bounties. In fact, only five percent of detainees were actually “scooped up” by United States forces and eighty-six percent of the detainees were handed over at the time the United States was offering large bounties for captured suspected enemies. [17]
[edit] The Future
Since 2005, support for closing the detention facility has increased dramatically. According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, and a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 53 percent of Americans think the United States should close Guantanmo Bay and find another way to deal with the prisoners there. [18] [19]
When President Barack Obama ran for office he made closing Guantanamo a priority. He made it seem simple: "While we're at it," he said at a primary rally in San Antonio Texas, "we're going to close Guantanamo. And we're going to restore habeas corpus. ... We're going to lead by example…by not just word but by deed.” [20]
Last Thursday in dueling speech with Cheney, Obama seemed less certain about how to close Guantanamo. Although he spoke in a condemning tone about the prison and enhanced interrogation tactics, Obama admitted to facing some of the same challenges Bush faced when he announced a desire to close the facility in 2006: what to do with the detainees who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.
“But even when this process is complete,” he said, “there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” [21]
Although Obama said he was confident he could “clean up the mess” the situation appears to be more complicated. His sudden sidestep from closing the camps increases suspicion about what really happened there and puts even more pressure on the media to uncover the real Guantanamo.
GOVERNMENT SECRECY
How do we know about GUANTANAMO BAY?
by Charlene Music
NTRODUCTION
For six years he was known as Detainee 063, and alleged to be the “20th highjacker” in the Sept 11 attacks. A Pentagon official called him “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and the Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes cited his case as justification for the Bush Administration’s approval of aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay.
So it came as a surprise when on May 22nd military prosecutors dropped all charges of war crimes and murder against Mohammed Al-Qahtani. No one gave an explanation; however, the abusive questioning that Al-Qahtani endured as a Guantanamo prisoner is the most likely reason for the ruling.
Like Al-Qahtani, numerous detainees contend that they were treated harshly and forced to falsely confess at Guantanamo Bay. Their reports remain unconfirmed and members of Congress who visited Guantanamo maintain that the treatment of the captives is humane.
However, the fact remains that charges were dropped against Al-Qahtani. This suggests that something went wrong, and has been going wrong, at Guantanamo Bay.
In the midst of the barriers and secrets, for 6 years, the media has played an essential role in informing Americans and the world about Guantanamo Bay. Journalists have disclosed information that has helped keep the Bush Administration in check. They have stirred debates about the existence of this prison. However, this has been an arduous task.
SOME HISTORY ON GUANTANAMO
However, after the Cuban revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro objected to the treaty. He has wanted the United States out of the country since, and yet has been unable to break the treaty without the consent of the United States. Each year, Fidel Castro refuses to cash the payments made by the United States for the lease of the land.
From the 1970s onward, Guantanamo was used mostly to house Cuban and Haitian refugees intercepted at sea. In 2002, with the 9/11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo suddenly shifted to become a detention facility for “enemy combatants” of the War on Terror. The base holds three camps: Camp Delta, which includes Camp Echo, Camp Iguana, and Camp XRay, which has been closed
Ever since, Guantanamo has become one of the most scrutinized bases in the world.
SOME NUMBERS
Most detainees held at Guantanamo are held for fighting an untraditional war. Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. By 2006, after four years, only 10 detainees of nearly 600 had been charged with war crimes. Of these 420 have been released without charge, and as of May 2008, approximately 270 remain.[22]
Defence Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate committee that of the prisoners still there, about 70 have been cleared for release. “The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them lose once we return them home.”[23]
MEDIA COVERAGE
“In the best of times, covering Guantanamo means wrangling with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, with logistics so nonsensical that they turn two hours of reporting into an 18-hour-day, with hostile escorts who seem to think you’re in league with Al Qaeda, and with the dispiriting reality that you’re sure to encounter more iguanas that war-on-terror suspects.”[24]
This is the way reporter Carol J. Williams describes the experience of writing about the situation at Guantanamo Bay. “What little we learn often comes to light by accident, through casual slips-of-the-lips by military doctors, lawyers and jailers,” she adds.
Media attempting to give coverage have faced ever-increasing limitations since Guantanamo became a detainee camp in 2002. These include restroom escorts, restricted interviews, and no speaking to people in civilian clothes. “There’s a virtual absolute control over who we talk to and how, and a deep degree of distrust of allowing reporters to talk to people doing their job,” explained Carol Rosenberg, a reporter for the Miami Herald.
After 2003, a series of suicide attempts and hunger strikes has made it increasingly harder to gain access to Guantanamo. Less and less access is permitted to the press as difficult situations with the detainees escalate. The restrictions have made it increasingly harder to figure out what the conditions are for detainees.
The Bush Administration’s original plan was to interrogate the men and prosecute the worst before military tribunals. However, six years later their fate remains uncertain.
For visiting media, the military uses different vocabulary in order to avoid admitting the existence of any mistakes or problems: instead of using the words ‘suicide attempt’, guards use ‘manipulative self-injurious behavior’ or ‘self-harm incidents.’ Hunger strikes are only recognized as “fasting.”
In 2006, however, Carol J. Williams reported the acknowlegement of suicide attempts by Captain John Edmundson, the Naval Hospital commander of the Guantanamo base. During a tour, she asked if the hospital facility had ever been near capacity. To her surprise, he obliviously replied “Only during the mass-hanging incident.”
In 2003 there were 350 ‘self-harm incidents,’ 120 of them suicide attempts, 23 of them simultaneous. However, it wasn’t until 2005 that officials disclosed this information and that the New York Times reported on them. Officials declared they had not made the incidents public because they were considered “self-injurious behavior” to get attention and not serious suicide attempts.
Critics denounced the delay in the disclosure of this information. Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International expressed dismay at “the extreme measures the Pentagon is taking to cover up things that have happened in Guantanamo.”
On June 13, 2006, Carol Rosenberg and three other journalists found themselves on the base at the time that three Arab captives successfully committed suicide. They were able to report the suicide deaths, however that same day, the military ordered all news media off the base by 10am the next morning. The Pentagon also canceled a meeting scheduled with journalists in the aftermath of the suicides.
One more time, the United States resorted to secrecy. It gave the public one more reason to believe the United States has something terrible to hide.
Reporters Without Borders condemned the Pentagon’s decision to force the journalists off the base. “We call on the US government to take the necessary steps to guarantee the media free access to the naval base at Guantanamo,”[25] said Reporters Without Borders.
On a weekly basis officials offer media tours of the detention camp. Hundreds of reporters, US senators and governors, and foreign diplomats have visited the base. However the tours provide very little information; they vaguely cover the basics of detention and the ways in which detainee cases are reviewed.
According to reporter Carol J. Williams, the typical day for a journalist at Guantanamo starts at dawn, with breakfast at 6am. At 7am the ‘guests’ are taken across the bay to the main naval base in small boats. Before arriving everyone must agree to certain ground rules: journalists may not have contact with detainees (who are removed from sight from all camps except one during media tours), and they can only make eye contact with the most compliant prisoners.
Security measures begin even before visitors have reached the camp, according to reporter Emily Witt. There is a canopied checkpoint about a half-mile away. When the van arrives, soldiers check identifications while others overlook the proceedings holding an M-16. Orange construction barriers follow the checkpoint, past which only one vehicle can go at a time. Then there are signs: Camp Delta. "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." No Photographs.
The security proceedings go on and on. As you pass the fences that surround the camp, a guard opens a gate. The van is driven in; the guard locks the gate behind. All passengers must disembark and show IDs while the guards inspect the vehicle.
Then the rules are reviewed: “No photographs of empty guard towers. No photographs that include two guard towers in one frame. No photographs of the guards without their permission. Photographs of detainees are allowed only below the neck or from behind. These rules are cautionary, because everything is reviewed and censored. No visits are unannounced.”[26]
Given the intense media restrictions, coverage of tribunal sessions is critical, reporter Carol J. Williams explains. This is the only way to put “a human face on the prisoners, whose names and nationalities were only disclosed in March under a court order following an Associated Press legal challenge.”[27]
In 2007, torture expert Karen Greenberg wrote an article where she described the tour as “two-days-plus of a military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with actual prisoners) designed to ‘make transparent’ the base, its facilities, and its manifold contributions to our country’s national security.” Emily Witt reported, “If… the camp teaches you anything, it’s a lesson on acting like nothing is wrong.”
"We are making a conscious effort to reach out to all the media so that you can see what's happening here — that it's good, that it's not all the horror stories you hear out there," said Army Brig. Gen. Edward Leacock, deputy commander of detention operations, in an introduction to reporters May 10, 2006.[28]
However, journalists continue to give testimony of the endless restrictions placed on reporting.
HOW WE KNOW
Much of what we know about Guantanamo has been disclosed through different channels in the media.
On February 28, 2003, a manual called “Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedure,” designated “Unclassified/For Official Used Only,” was leaked on Wikileaks. This 238-page document describes the main operations at Guantanamo. The document also exposed the use of extreme psychological stress on detainees and the systematic methods employed by the US military to keep them from meeting with the Red Cross.
In June 2005, Time Magazine obtained and published the secret interrogation log of Mohammed Al-Qahtani. It registered 49 days of 20-hour-per-day questioning, which concurred with Al-Qahtani’s testimony of abusive interrogations and torture. Among other things, officials hydrated him with an IV to the point that his feet swelled and he urinated on himself.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys are defending Al-Qahtani, argue that “the military commissions at Guantanamo allow secret evidence, hearsay evidence, and evidence obtained through torture,” which is “unlawful, unconstitutional, and a perversion of justice.”[30]
In January 2007, the Washington Post[31], the Guardian[32], CNN, the BBC and other news media reported on the accounts of FBI agents who witnessed disturbing mistreatment of prisoners.
They observed detainees chained in a fetal position to the floor, subjected to extreme temperatures; one was gagged with duct tape. One Boston agent reported observing two detainees chained in the fetal position for 18-24 hours. They had urinated and defecated on themselves. On another occasion, the air conditioning was turned off making the temperature in a room over 100F. The detainee lay almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him, after pulling his hair out through the night.
The reports were the result of an FBI internal survey conducted in 2004, which asked approximately 500 employees who once served at Guantanamo to report possible mistreatment they witnessed. More than 24 incidents were revealed.
Most of the personal details about Guantanamo detainees have been learned from the American civilian lawyers known as the Habeas Corpus lawyers. Habeas Corpus is the name of the legal action through which any person can seek relief from unlawful detention. These are basically the only people who are able to sit across from detainees and ask for their side of the story.
Joshua Colangelo-Bryan is one of these attorneys. He grew up in New York City where he works at Dorsey &Whitney, a firm specializing in commercial litigation. His firm has represented six detainees of Camp Delta, three of whom have been released to their home country Bahrain. Colangelo-Bryan traveled to the detainees’ homes in the Middle East to meet with their families and brought an NPR reporter with him. He also gave interviews to Harper’s Magazine and the New York Times, trying to get a word out about what he believes is a moral outrage.
“Is it fair to call someone a terrorist who isn’t even accused of being involved in violent activity directly or indirectly? Many people not even accused of a crime remain in Guantanamo, even in the second year of ARB proceedings,” he expressed to reporters. The ARBs are the Annual Review Boards which determine the legality of a detainee’s imprisonment.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. and Attorney Charles Swift, who himself graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, is also a strong critic of the system. “They’re giving rules that can be changed at any time. The detainee does not have the right to confront witnesses, and he has no right to know the evidence against him. The presumption of innocence does not exist.”
Colangelo believes attorneys must speak out. “Through those meetings, we tell the world what’s happening,” he says. “It’s the most crucial function that we have. It’s not that we accept everything [from the detainees] as the gospel truth, but many of their stories are corroborated by government sources.”
WHEN WILL GUANTANAMO END
Al-Qahtani is only one in a list of approximately 750 suspected unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo. More than 500 have already been released or transferred to other countries for “continued detention,” but then set free.[33]
The decision made by countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raises the question of whether the United States holds innocent victims caught in a dragnet of suspects or handed over for money.
Yet only days ago, a former Taliban fighter who was held at Guantanamo for over three years and then released, drove a car bomb into an Iraqi police patrol. His name was Abdullah Salih Al Ajmi. He was handed to authorities in his native Kuwait in 2005, and then released by the government.
In 2005, the Washington Post reported that at least 10 detainees released from Guantanamo had been recaptured or killed fighting US coalition forces.[34]
This month, the Pentagon declared that 36 former Guantanamo inmates were “confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism.”[35] The United States insists that although many former detainees have been freed, it does not mean they were not dangerous. “They were part of Taliban, al-Qaida, or associated with forces that are engaged in hostilities,” said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.
“This doesn’t alter the injustice, or support the administration’s argument that setting aside their rights is justified,” said Alistair Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International. Activists insist that militants going back to battle does not undercut the fact that the United States is violating the rights of Guantanamo Bay inmates.
