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In March 2007, Karen Greenberg reported on a visit she had made to the war-on-terror prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, and what it felt like to be distinctly offshore of American justice. She began that piece this way: "Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at Guanta'namo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to 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."
In my introduction to that piece, I wrote an initial paragraph that, I think, still catches the essence of American justice at Gitmo in those years:
"Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guanta'namo was the sort of place where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a recalcitrant prisoner 'extracted' from a cell for training purposes, could be beaten almost senseless. This actually happened to 35-year-old 'model soldier' Sean Baker, who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to Guanta'namo and he volunteered to be just such a 'prisoner,' donning the requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his 'extraction' and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular epileptic-style seizures 10 to 12 times a day. (And remember the Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing that he wasn't a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing the job.)"
Greenberg ended her report then this way: "Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back. 'Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back,' one of our escorts warns me over lunch."
You won't be surprised to learn that she's never been back. In addition to her early book on the nightmare that became Guanta'namo, however, she's returned to the subject at TomDispatch for years and here she is again, more than two decades after the first prisoner arrived there. Both of us can only hope that it finally is the last time. Tom
Guanta'namo's First 7,627 Days
Will America's Forever Prison Finally Close on Biden's Watch?
As of December 8, 2022, Guanta'namo Bay detention facility "a prison offshore of American justice and built for those detained in this country's never-ending Global War on Terror" has been open for nearly 21 years (or, to be precise, 7,627 days). Thirteen years ago, I published a book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days. It told the story of the military officers and staff who received the prison's initial detainees at that U.S. naval base on the island of Cuba early in 2002. Like the hundreds of prisoners that followed, they would largely be held without charges or trial for years on end.
Ever since then, time and again, I've envisioned writing the story of its ultimate closure, its last days. Today, eyeing the moves made by the Biden administration, it seems reasonable to review the past record of that prison's seemingly never-ending existence, the failure of three presidents to close it, and what if anything is new when it comes to one of the more striking scenes of ongoing injustice in American history.
The Beginning
When, in January 2002, those first planes landed at Guanta'namo (which we came to know as Gitmo), the hooded, shackled, goggled, and diapered prisoners in them were described by the Pentagon as "the worst of the worst." In truth, however, most of them were neither top leaders of al-Qaeda nor, in many cases, even members of that terrorist group. Initially housed at Camp X-Ray in open-air cages without plumbing, dressed in those now-iconic orange jumpsuits, the detainees descended into a void, with little or no prison policies to guide their captors. When Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, the man in charge of the early detention operation, asked Washington for guidelines and regulations to run the prison camp, Pentagon officials assured him that they were still on the drawing board, but that adhering in principle to the "spirit of the Geneva Conventions" was, at least, acceptable.
Those first 100 days left General Lehnert and his officers trying to provide some modicum of decency in an altogether indecent situation. For example, Lehnert and those close to him allowed one detainee to make a call to his wife after the birth of their child. They visited others in their cells, talked with them, and tried to create conditions that allowed for some sort of religious worship, while forbidding interrogations by officials from a variety of U.S. government agencies without a staff member in the interrogation hut as well. Against the wishes of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, a lawyer working with the general even called in representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
By the end of March 2002, the U.S. had installed prefab prisons at Guanta'namo in which those detainees could be all too crudely housed and had brought in a new team of officers to oversee the operation while pulling Lehnert and his crew out. The new leadership included people reporting directly to Rumsfeld as they put in place a brutal regime whose legacy has lasted, in all too many ways, to this day.
Despite General Lehnert's efforts, in the nearly 21 years since its inception, Guanta'namo has successfully left the codes of American law, military law, and international law in the dust, as it has morality itself in a brazen willingness to implement policies of unspeakable cruelty. That includes both physical mistreatment and the limbo of allowing prisoners to exist in a state of indefinite detention. Most of its detainees were held without any charges whatsoever, a concept so contrary to American democracy and legality that it's hard to fathom how such a thing could happen, no less how it's lasted these 7,627 days.
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