Day of Shame: Five years of Guantanamo

Jan. 11 is the fifth anniversary of the arrival of the first group of prisoners at Guantanamo.
Some of those original 20 men are still there today, having been through almost unbelievable travails and abuses. None face the prospect of anything like a fair trial, and most are expected never to have any trial at all. Yet unlike prisoners-of-war who are held under the conditions defined in international law they cannot even expect to return to their homes at the end of any duly defined war. (And they are held in conditions far, far worse than the minimum standards established for POWs under international law.)
Now, there are some 395 men still in Gitmo. The vast majority of them have been there between two-and-a-half years and five years. Just 14 men were added to the rolls there last September, having been flown in from a secret CIA pirson or prisons elsewhere.
My column in Thursday’s CSM is on Guantanamo. You can find it here (or here.)
It concludes:

    Guantánamo is… a major moral challenge for the American people. We need to find a way to close this camp of shame and shine a light on the abuses committed there so that they’re never repeated.
    The detainees against whom there is solid evidence should be tried, and if found guilty , incarcerated. Let’s see and fully examine all the evidence. The rest should be released and given help for their rehabilitation after their years of dehumanizing detention.
    Will the new Congress take up this task? I certainly hope so.

I know that much of the US media Thursday will be busy dissecting Bush’s speech. I am really, really glad I decided to focus on Gunatanamo.
Does anyone want to see my collection of Guantanamo-related URLs on Delicious? It’s here.

6 thoughts on “Day of Shame: Five years of Guantanamo”

  1. It’s nice that you are concerned with the 395 men in Guantanamo, but there are over 2 million in domestic US prisons in conditions much, much harsher who very, very desperately need immediate help and assistance. I don’t expect anyone to do anything about them, liberals only talk, but it would be nice if occasionally people would at least think about them, and maybe even once or twice a year mention them. Thanks.

  3. Mike, I do mention the terrible incarceration rate in this country, and the social effects of that. Also, re the conditions, it’s often invidious to make such comparisons… But all the detainees in Gitmo share the terrible limbo of not having a clue how long they will be held, or even what particular accusations have been brought against them. None has ever had anything resembling a fair trial, or free access to defense counsel… Only ten have ever had any charges brought against them. Many, probably most of them, have been subjected to prolonged periods of torture; most have been held in near-total isolation for between 30 months and 5 years at this point. All are held thousands of miles from their families; and for some, reportedly their families still have no clue where they are, or if they’re dead or alive.
    A comparison of conditions? Well… if matters ever got that bad for 20 US citizens, let alone 395, the country would be in an uproar. And quite rightly so. They have been reduced to breathing, walking-around zombies. Did you see the photos they distributed of Jose Padilla? And he was one of the security detainees of whose treatment they are proud!
    It’s really not an either/or situation, that one should be concerned about either one group or the other. I see it as all one matrix: motivated by fear and the strong urge to “punish, punish, punish.”

  5. “A comparison of conditions? Well… if matters ever got that bad for 20 US citizens, let alone 395, the country would be in an uproar.”
    I think this is baseless and wrong. I would bet you that a comparative study of actual conditions in Texas state prisons with those at Gitmo would convince you you’d rather be held at Gitmo.
    “They have been reduced to breathing, walking-around zombies. Did you see the photos they distributed of Jose Padilla? ”
    Mr. Padilla IS of course a US citizen, and yet I have not noticed much of the uproar you predict above.

  6. I’ve been inside the Texas prisons and the conditions there are pretty damn bad. A Texas prisoner’s lot, however, differs from that of a Gitmo inmate in two important ways: he has regular human interaction, and he knows more or less when he’s getting out.
    The analogy you’re looking for, I think, is to the Federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado. I’d encourage any human being to take the time to read James Aiken’s testimony about ADX Florence during the penalty phase of the Moussaoui trial (there’s an article about it here). At the moment, ADX Florence holds about 400 prisoners, most of them American citizens.

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