January 11, 2002: Four months after 9/11, the United States flew the first twenty men into a makeshift prison in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station. Today marks five years since the detention camp there was opened. Over those five years, the camp has proved to be both a public relations disaster for America and a failure as a counterterrorism measure. In both respects, it resembles our disastrous national misadventure in Iraq. Both situations are beyond repair, yet, as in Iraq, there is every indication that President Bush intends to prolong the mistake and pass the responsibility for cleaning up his mess to the next president.
From here in Bangalore, India, where I write this, the war in Iraq dwarfs every other discussion about our post-9/11 policies. Guantánamo is thus viewed almost entirely in light of the revelations of torture in Abu Ghraib. (Indeed, the photos from Abu Ghraib may have influenced the outcome in our landmark Supreme Court challenge to the Guantánamo detentions in 2004: the pictures became public just after the case was argued, but before the Supreme Court had issued its decision.)
The similarities between the Guantánamo mess and the Abu Ghraib debacle are more than superficial. In both cases the law enforcement community was caught off guard by the size of an unexpected challenge and had little reliable intelligence to work with. On 9/11 the terrorist attacks caught the intelligence agencies largely unprepared, and with too little reliable information to hunt down the terrorist conspirators in Afghanistan or elsewhere. In Iraq, the military was overwhelmed by the strength and scale of the insurgency it faced. In both instances, the response of the intelligence gathering and law enforcement apparatus was traditional and predictable: carry out mass sweeps and arrests, gather up as many people as quickly as possible, and rely on the interrogation process to pick out any actual suspects from the mass of people swept in.
It's obvious that initial sweeps like these, done with little intelligence or evidence, will bring in many innocents. But what's less obvious is that the need to pick out suspects from a mass of people about whom the interrogators know little or nothing, most of whom rightly assert they are innocent, puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the interrogation process. From this pressure, abuses predictably follow.
We've seen all of these hackneyed plot elements make their appearances over the five years of detentions at Guantánamo. First there were sweeps: Out of the hundreds of detainees, only 1 in 20 were captured by U.S. forces; the rest were captured by third parties and frequently sold to us in exchange for bounties paid indiscriminately to villagers and warlords during the chaos of the Afghan war. As with every indiscriminant system of detention, the result was a very poor yield of the guilty and a very large number of innocents being detained. We know from the military's own records that most of the detainees at Guantánamo have no link to terrorism. In interview after interview, CIA and military sources have told reporters that the vast majority of detainees "don't have anything to do with" terrorism, "didn't belong there," "weren't fighting." (Our organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, has a report out, Faces of Guantánamo, with some of their individual stories.) Only ten detainees out of the 400 still languishing at the base have been charged with crimes of any sort, and none have had a trial. And finally, there was widespread, systematic torture: sexual abuse, force feeding, withholding of medical treatment for serious injuries, and endless varieties of physical and psychological brutalization.
By creating a safe haven for unchecked wrongful detention and abuse, Guantánamo promotes hatred of the United States. It also serves as a model for repressive regimes overseas, which in turn foster their own violent, extremist opposition. It is an utter failure as an intelligence gathering tool, both in the narrow view--innocents have no intelligence to share--as well as the broad view: by alienating the Muslim world from us, Guantánamo "has deeply undermined the ability of the United States to obtain critical human intelligence about the activities of al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations," as my colleagues at CCR put it today. And keeping Guantánamo detainees outside the reach of the courts has helped cover up the fact that the administration has detained so few real terrorists, and thus has reduced political pressure on the executive and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies from the voting public. All of this makes us less safe.
How, then, is this still going on after five years? Major General Jay Hood, commander at Guantánamo, admitted to the Wall Street Journal that "[s]ometimes we just didn't get the right folks," but innocents remain at the base because "[n]obody wants to be the one to sign the release papers. ... there's no muscle in the system." While the courts are supposed to provide that muscle, the last major act of the Republican-controlled Congress was to strip away the right of the courts to hear challenges to the legality of their detentions. And the President has as little incentive to admit error in Guantánamo as he does to admit defeat and withdraw from Iraq.
Congress has it within its power to make things right. It can undo the last Congress' attempt to strip away the right of habeas corpus review for the detainees in the federal courts. But more importantly, it can mandate that Guantánamo--and every other detention center the President has placed intentionally outside the reach of the law--be shut down.
CCR and other groups are planning a variety of events today in New York City, Washington DC, and elsewhere to call for the closure of the base. We're doing so in the hope that events like these will help change the mentality that has allowed this tired story to be repeated whenever America is caught off guard by its enemies, and allows itself to be convinced by politicians that abandoning the rule of law and "taking the gloves off" is a solution. The rest of the world has seen what it means to have the gloves off in Iraq and Guantánamo and has rightfully concluded that such reckless aggression is strategically counterproductive and morally wrong. If we can't manage to do that, then even if Congress closes down every Guantánamo--and there may be many more out there, in Iraq and hidden throughout the world--they will spring up again during the next crisis. It's naïve to delude ourselves that Rumsfeld, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, and other members of the pro-torture legal establishment are merely "bad apples" whose removal--along with closure of the base--will ensure that we never see another stain on our national character like Guantánamo. The last five years are not just a failure of our system of laws; they are a national moral failure, one that may require generations to be set right.
--January 11, 2006
from Bangalore, India
(I'm on vacation here, and so will be slow to respond to comments)