Those whose mailboxes, like mine, are bombarded daily with the outpourings of Slate know that Dahlia Lithwick is their most readable and possibly most astute contributor. In the past, the Supreme Court been her regular beat, but
her most recent column focuses on the scandal that is Guantanamo. Noting that three examples of a phenomenon are normally considered sufficient to render it newsworthy, she wonders why three recent reports in the last two weeks confirming the bankruptcy of the Bush Administration's policies in Guantanamo have garnered so little attention.
The first source Lithwick cites is Connie Hegland, whose exhaustive review outlined in the
National Journal of hundreds of court documents, including habeas corpus petitions and edited transcripts of hearings before military Combatant Status Review Tribunals to screen for enemy combatants documented that the majority were neither Al Qaeda nor Taliban nor even Afghan.
Some had "combat" experience that seems to have consisted solely of being hit by U.S. bombs. Most were not picked up by U.S. forces but handed over to our military by Afghan warlords in exchange for enormous bounties and political payback.
Another report by Hegland, Lithwick writes, paints the picture of a government case against detainees consisting primarily of dubious accusations against each other elicited as the product of hundreds of weary hours of interrigation.
[One}detainee "confessed" following an interminable interrogation, shouting: "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." When the government tried to list this as a confession, his own interrogators were forced to break the outrageous game of telephone and explain it as sarcasm. A Yemeni accused of being a Bin Laden bodyguard eventually "admitted" to having seen Bin Laden five times: "Three times on Al Jazeera and twice on Yemeni news." His file: "Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden."
Lithwick's second source is an evaluation by two prisoners' lawyers (one a faculty member at Seton Hall) of the government's own written determinations presented to Combatant Status Review Tribunals as the foundation of its case against Guantanamo detainees:
. . . 55 percent of the detainees are not suspected of having committed any hostile acts against the United States and . . . 86 percent were captured either by the Northern Alliance or by Pakistan "at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for capture of suspected enemies." . . . [A flier] distributed in Afghanistan at the time of the sweeps . . . reads: "Get wealth and power beyond your dreams . . . You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch Al Qaida and Taliban murderers." . . . [Most] are accused of "associating with terrorists" based on having met with unnamed individuals, used a guesthouse, owned a Casio watch, or wearing olive drab clothing. Thirty-nine percent possessed a Kalashnikov rifle--almost as fashionable in that part of the world as a Casio.
Lithwick's third source is the U.N. report on humanitarian conditions at Guantanamo, which accuses the U.S. of torture, arbitrary detention and violation of the right to a fair trial and concludes that "The United States government should close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities without further delay" and either try the prisoners or release them. The government pretends to hold its captives for some further information that it claims will be elicited about vague plots of future terrorist strikes against America. However, government documents show that virtually no useful intelligence has emerged from this prisoner pool to date. So the Bush Administration's last, desperate argument is that by not releasing the inmates,
we are keeping them from rejoining the war against us, a war that has no end. But that is the most disingenuous claim of all: If any hardened anti-American zealots leave Guantanamo, they will be of our own creation. Nothing will radicalize a man faster than years of imprisonment based on unfounded charges. . . .
The only real justification for the continued disgrace that is Guantanamo is that the government refuses to admit it's made a mistake. Releasing hundreds of prisoners after holding them for four years without charges would be big news. Better, a Guantanamo at which nothing has happened in four years. Better to drain the camp slowly, releasing handfuls of prisoners at a time. . . . Guantanamo represents a spectacular failure of every branch of government. Congress is willing to pass a bill stripping courts of habeas-corpus jurisdiction for detainees but unwilling to probe what happens to them. The Supreme Court's decision in Rasul v. Bush conferred seemingly theoretical rights enforceable in theoretical courtrooms. The right to challenge a government detention is older than this country and yet Guantanamo grinds on. It grinds on because the Bush administration gets exactly what it pays for in that lease: Guantanamo is a not-place. It's neither America nor Cuba. It is peopled by people without names who face no charges. Non-people facing non-trials to defend non-charges are not a story. They are a headache.