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Guanta'namo? Remind me, what's that?
Oh, wait, how could I have forgotten? It's that all-American offshore prison of injustice, opened in January 2002, that became the holding area for this country's prisoners in its "war on terror," many of whom had been tortured at CIA "black sites" elsewhere on the planet. They had, in a sense, already been "convicted" of crimes (whether they had committed them or not) without trial but not without trials (and tribulations) galore. Now, they were being held at that specially created prison camp at an American military base in" yes!" Cuba, a country that, at least since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the U.S. has embargoed and had nothing to do with economically. So, what a perfect place to create an all-too-literal hell on earth.
And yes, Guanta'namo, which I'll bet you haven't heard a word about in months, if not years, is still there, still operating, still holding 30 of this country's "forever prisoners." And hey, Joe Biden is at work ensuring that he'll be the fourth American president incapable of closing it down, despite recent complaints from 17 Democratic senators. As they wrote him: "Continuing to imprison men who have never been charged with a crime and who have been approved for release is inconsistent with American values. No country can hold people for decades without charge or trial and claim to be dedicated to the rule of law." (Obviously, they were rushed and so didn't have their document proofread or else that last sentence would have read "No country other than the United States can hold-- )
As it happens, for the last 16 years, starting with a press trip to Gitmo, Karen Greenberg has been covering that "crown jewel of the administration's offshore network of secret prisons" (as she put it in 2007) for TomDispatch. And even while writing her earliest pieces for this site, she undoubtedly might have guessed that, in April 2024, she would still be writing about Gitmo (as it's known). In fact, she all too tellingly entitled her second TomDispatch piece on the subject in September 2007 "Guanta'namo Forever," and forever it all too sadly has proven to be. With that in mind, so many years later, let her look back at the grim world many Americans would simply prefer to forget, but that, in some deeply uncomfortable sense, couldn't be more memorable. Tom
"Quaint and Obsolete?"
The Peril of Forgetting Guanta'namo
Last weekend my father, Larry Greenberg, passed away at the age of 93. Several days later, I received an email from the French film director Phillippe Diaz who sent me a link to his soon-to-be-released I am Gitmo, a feature movie about the now-infamous Guanta'namo Bay detention facility . As I was soon to discover, those two disparate events in my life spoke to one another with cosmic overtones.
Mind you, I've been covering Guanta'namo since President George W. Bush and his team, having responded to the 9/11 attacks by launching their disastrous "Global War on Terror," set up that offshore prison to house people American forces had captured. Previewing Diaz's movie, I was surprised at how it unnerved me. After so many years of exposure to the grim realities of that prison, somehow his film touched me anew. There were moments that made me sob, moments when I turned down the sound so as not to hear more anguished cries of pain from detainees being tortured, and moments that made me curious about the identities of the people in the film. Although the names of certain officials are mentioned, the central characters are the detainees and individual interrogators, as well as defense attorneys and guards, all of whom interacted at Guanta'namo's prison camp over the course of its two-plus decades of existence.
While viewing it, I was reminded of a question that Tom Engelhardt, founder and editor of TomDispatch, has frequently asked me: "What is it about Guanta'namo that's so captivated you over the years?" Why is it, he wanted to know, that year after year, as its story of injustice unfolded in a never-ending cycle of trials that failed to start, prisoners cleared for release but still held in captivity, and successive administrations whose officials simply shrugged in defeat when it came to closing the nightmarish institution, it continues to haunt me so? "Would you be willing," he asked, "to reflect on that for TomDispatch?" As it turned out, the death of my dad somehow helped me grasp a way to answer that question with previously unattainable clarity.
The Missing Outrage
As a start, in response to his question, let me say that, despite my own continued immersion in news about the prison camp, I'm struck that, in the American mainstream, there hasn't been more headline-making outrage over the never-ending reality of what came to be known as Gitmo. From the moment it began in January 2002 and a photo appeared of shackled men bent over in the dirt beside the open-air cages that would hold them, wearing distinctive orange jumpsuits, its horrid destiny should have been apparent. The Pentagon Public Affairs Office published that immediately iconic image with the hope, according to spokesperson Torie Clarke, that it would "allay some of our critics" (who were already accusing the U.S. of operating outside of the Geneva Conventions).
Rather than allay them, it caught the path of cruelty and lawlessness on which the United States would continue for so many endless years. In April 2004, the world would see images of prisoners in American custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, naked, hooded, cuffed, sexually humiliated, and abused. Later reports would reveal the existence of what came to be known as "black sites," operated by the CIA, in countries around the world, where detainees were tortured using what officials of the Bush administration called "enhanced interrogation techniques."
For 22 years now, through four different administrations, that prison camp in Cuba, distinctly offshore of any conception of American justice, has held individuals captured in the war on terror in a way that defies any imaginable principles of due process, human rights, or the rule of law. Of the nearly 780 prisoners kept there, only 18 were ever actually charged with a crime and of the eight military court convictions, four were overturned while two remain on appeal.
A large number of those captured were originally sold to the Americans for bounty or simply picked up randomly in places in countries like Afghanistan known to be inhabited by terrorists and so assumed, with little or no hard evidence, to be terrorists themselves. They were then, of course, denied access to lawyers. And as I was reminded recently on a trip to England where I met with a couple of released detainees, those who survived Gitmo still suffer, physically and psychologically, from their treatment at American hands. Nor have they found justice or any remedy for the lasting harms caused by their captivity. And while the post-9/11 war on terror moment has largely faded into the past (though the American military is still fighting it in distant lands), that prison camp has yet to be shut down.
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