Hullabaloo

Friday, January 11, 2008

 
Close Guantanamo

by digby

If you've been tooling around the blogosphere today you may have noticed that the ACLU is sponsoring "Close Guantanamo Day." You can find out more about it by clicking the ad on the left. (Do any of you Deaniacs still have your orange hats?)

The ACLU asked that we write blog posts about Gitmo and help educate our readers on the subject. I thought it would be more helpful to simply point you to one of the great, underused resources of the left blogsphere today: the interviews of attorneys and journalists involved in the war on terror and Guantanamo which have been done over the past several years at The Talking Dog:

Here's an excerpt of his interview with journalist David Rose:

The Talking Dog: Have you had a chance to return to Guantanamo since he publication of your book, Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights?

David Rose: I tried to go to Guantanamo last June (of 2006). I was all set to cover the first military commission trials, when the news broke of the suicides of three detainees. The Pentagon suddenly revoked my clearance. Then, as I was in Washington, I managed to get a new clearance, faxed to my hotel, and we arranged transport by a circuitous route on civilian aircraft via Miami and Kingston, Jamaica, but ultimately, the Defense Department refused to let me in at that time, and I have not been back.

The Talking Dog: Do you have a comment on why, to this day, American detention policy, whether at Guantanamo, Bagram, Kandahar, Iraq, or elsewhere, including the ghost prisons and rendition program, remain a much bigger issue in Europe and outside of the United States than they do inside of the United States?

David Rose: In all fairness, it has become a far bigger issue in the United States since I wrote the book. Of course, John Kerry did not mention this at all when he ran for President– not one mention of Guantanamo. Large numbers of Americans think it is just perfectly fine to hold people this way. They don’t see the broader issues– that Guantanamo and America’s treatment of detainees is virtually a recruiting sergeant for terrorists, and that the policy is misguided ethically and counterproductive in achieving the supposed goals of fighting terrorism.

The Talking Dog: What were your impressions of General Geoffrey Miller, formerly commanding officer at Guantanamo and later at Abu Ghraib, when you met him?

David Rose: General Miller is a forceful, gung ho character to be sure. He was very keen to talk of his achievements, and the achievements of his staff. He is also very scary. He had no background whatsoever in intelligence or in interrogations- he was an artillery officer. In his view, intelligence gathering was a volume business- so many pages of transcripts, as if interrogations were equivalent to hitting targets with artillery rounds. He was very dogmatic, and very difficult to talk to. Quite frightening, actually.

The Talking Dog: Were there any other military or government officials that made an impression on you when you met them at Guantanamo?

David Rose: Two certainly come to mind. One was Louis Louk, then the chief surgeon, who left Guantanamo before the advent of the force-feeding regime. He made a comment about a detainee who wanted to kill himself being “a spoiled brat”. I found that troubling, actually.

The other was the chaplain (not Captain Yee, the Moslem chaplain), but the chief chaplain, a Baptist, I believe, Steve Feehan. He viewed the detainees as second class human beings– which I found quite troubling for a man of the cloth.

The Talking Dog: Do you have a comment on American media coverage of its government’s detention policy?

David Rose: There has been very distinguished reporting in the Washington Post and the New York Times, with the Washington Post probably the best. I have enormous admiration for Jane Mayer and the work she has done in the New Yorker on this. Of course, large swathes of Middle America read nothing about any of this, and certainly, the networks are not covering it. But for various reasons, including early acceptance of governmental statements about holding “terrorists”, many people, including many in the media, have uncritically accepted the government’s explanations.

The Talking Dog: One section of your book is called “The Least Worst Place” and notes that one of the original premises for the selection of Guantanamo as a detention facility was that it was, uniquely perhaps, beyond the jurisdiction of the country it was in, Cuba, and yet still arguably beyond the jurisdiction of the USA, the country that controls it. That fiction seemed to have been previously rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, but now seems to have reemerged in a decision this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in Washington. Do you have a comment on that?

David Rose: The Court of Appeals Judgment deferred to the Congress. I’m sure that there is some constitutional authority supporting that. The Supreme Court is in no hurry to hear the case. British jurist Lord Steyn called Guantanamo a legal black hole– and the legal black hole has been dug again. The only way this will change is politically. This Administration has resisted the impact even of adverse decisions of the Supreme Court.

To change this, one would think that a crushing defeat for the Republican Party might help...

Back in the day I wrote a lot about General Geoffrey Miller, the half-mad artillery officer they sent to run Gitmo and then Abu Ghraib, whose policies led to the atrocities we all witnessed in those famous photographs.

Today the authorities claim that any resistance, within the camp, even self-destructive protest, is not the act of desperate men but an act of war:

Rear Admiral Harris is adamant that the people in his care are well looked after and are enemies of the United States.

He told me they use any weapon they can - including their own urine and faeces - to continue to wage war on the United States.

The suicide of three detainees, he reaffirmed to me, amounted to "asymmetrical warfare."

Those are the words of severely deluded, paranoid authoritarianism. It isn't just that Guantanamo is destroying our moral authority around the world. It's destroying us from within. It must be closed.


Here's a handy compendium of TTD's interviews:

Readers interested in legal issues and related matters associated with the "war on terror" may also find talking dog blog interviews with attorneys Angela Campbell, Stephen Truitt and Charles Carpenter, Gaillard Hunt, Robert Rachlin, Tina Foster, Brent Mickum, Marc Falkoff H. Candace Gorman, Eric Freedman, Michael Ratner, Thomas Wilner, Jonathan Hafetz, Joshua Denbeaux, Rick Wilson,
Neal Katyal, Joshua Colangelo Bryan, Baher Azmy, and Joshua Dratel (representing Guantanamo detainees and others held in "the war on terror"), with attorneys Donna Newman and Andrew Patel (representing "unlawful combatant" Jose Padilila), with Dr. David Nicholl, who spearheaded an effort among international physicians protesting force-feeding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, with physician and bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles on medical complicity in torture, with law professor and former Clinton Administration Ambassador-at-large for war crimes matters David Scheffer, with former Guantanamo detainees Moazzam Begg and Shafiq Rasul , with former Guantanamo Bay Chaplain James Yee, with former Guantanamo Army Arabic linguist Erik Saar, with law professor and former Army J.A.G. officer Jeffrey Addicott, with law professor and Coast Guard officer Glenn Sulmasy, with author and geographer Trevor Paglen and with author and journalist Stephen Grey on the subject of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, with journalist and author David Rose on Guantanamo, with journalist Michael Otterman on the subject of American torture and related issues, and with author and historian Andy Worthington detailing the capture and provenance of all of the Guantanamo detainees, to be of interest.*

*List updated


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digby 1/11/2008 12:28:00 PM |