If you are out and about this weekend, find a bookstore or newsstand and buy a copy of the September issue of Harper’s. The cover art is a modernist (modernist may be the wrong word; I’m not keeping up with trends in contemporary art) painting of a teacher and students posed for a class picture.
There are a number of good articles in this issue, but the one I most particularly want to call to your attention is “American Gulag: Prisoners’ Tales from the War on Terror” by Eliza Griswold. Griswold interviewed several former prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, and talked to family members and lawyers of prisoners still being held. The lawyers, working pro bono, are among 500 lawyers organized by the Center for Constitutional Rights to represent prisoners at Guantanamo. (The article probably will be posted on the web eventually, but not for two or three months.)
If even half of what Griswold writes is true, Guantanamo could be the blackest mark yet on our country’s history.
Highlights:
â–ºThere is no indication that the Hamdan decision will make a dime’s worth of difference to the “450 prisoners held at Guantanamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently ‘detained’ in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA ‘black sites’ around the world,” Griswold writes. President Bush has made up his mind that the Court in Hamdan ruled in his favor, so he sees no reason to change.
â–ºTo date, “98 detainees have died (34 of those deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse.”
â–ºSince even the Red Cross is given extremely limited and restricted access to the prisons (and, of course, no access at all to the “black sites,” shipboard brigs, or “forward operating sites” where most abuses occur), essentially this means there is no way to find out what’s really going on.
â–ºOnly about 5 percent of the prisoners at Guantanamo were arrested by Americans. The rest were captured by other Arabs Muslims/Middle Easterners and turned over or sold for a bounty. For example, Abdullah al Noaimi of Bahrain was captured by Pashtun tribesmen and sold to Pakistani security forces in 2001. At the time, Griswold writes, “there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab’s head, and fliers promising ‘wealth and power beyond your dreams’ were dropping, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘like snowflakes in December in Chicago.'” After several weeks of detention by the Pakistanis, al Noaimi was turned over to Americans at Kandahar. Al Noaimi had visited the U.S. and for a time was a student at Old Dominion University in Virginia. He figured he’d tell the Americans his arrest was a mistake, and he could go home.
Abdullah al Noaimi was kept in Guantanamo for four years. He only recently returned home. The U.S. military decided al Noaimi was an enemy combatant, although the evidence supporting this claim remains secret.
â–º”Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantanamo Bay,” Griswold says, “it is still the most transparent piece of the large mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments.”
â–ºA prominent Yemeni businessman, Abdulsalam al Hila, was in Egypt on business in September 2002 when he disappeared. His family had no idea where he was until, two years later, they received a letter smuggled out of a U.S. prison in Afghanistan.
â–ºIn 2004 an Afghani man was taken prisoner with his 12-year-old son. Both the father and son had a bag over their heads for eighteen days.
â–ºMen released from Bagram describe frequent beatings and days without food. The lawyers of the Center for Constitutional Rights say there is nothing they can do for prisoners there. They cannot even prove that U.S. law applies in Bagram.
Someday, whatever is going on in those prisons will see the light of day. And then there will be global outrage, and Americans will be shocked and say they had no idea any such thing was going on.
Elsewhere in this issue of Harper’s –a young man describes his internship with the Lincoln Group in Iraq. Lincoln Group is a pack of amateurs who got multi-million dollar contracts form the Pentagon to plant pro-U.S. stories in Middle Eastern newspapers. It’s a jaw-dropping story. See also Lewis Lapham’s “tribute” to Halliburton.