So really, who IS going to Gitmo?
I guess I never answered the question in the title of my last post. So the answer is: me, I'm going to Gitmo October 11.
Last week, I was contacted by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, Mr. Cully Stimson, who said he was organizing two one-day trips to Guantanamo in October, and invited me to make my choice between them. After hearing a little more about the trips, I decided to go. As Mr. Stimson described the trips to me, I'll be able to see a number of facilities and workspaces around the detention camp(s), and talk to a number of officials there. I asked if I could talk to some detainees, but he said that the delegates from the ICRC are the only outsiders who are allowed to meet with them. I am very sorry about that. But still, I think it's worth going so I can learn more about the system, the situation, and some of the people there.
I respect Mr. Stimson's decision to invite me. He made clear when we talked that he had been reading what I've been writing about the detention operation, so I guess he knows more or less where I'm coming from. I think it is a strength of people in a democratic culture to be able to reach out and maintain respectful relations and communications with people with whom one might expect to disagree. So the fact that he'd invited me even though he could reasonably expect me to be a tough questioner is another reason I decided to go. I am going to go in a spirit of listening and learning as much as I can. I told him, of course, that I would be writing as much as I could about the whole experience, and he said he expected that.
Of course, I shall be writing as fully about what I am not allowed to see and do at Gitmo as about what I am allowed to see and do.
The preceding post here about the newly legislated ground-rules for the new Military Commissions is very relevant to what is going to be going on in Gitmo in October. I don't expect that the new Military Commissions will be up and running by October 11, but no doubt some preparations will already have started to be made there for them.
Meantime, I need to learn as much as I can about the whole set-up at Gitmo before I go, so I'll know what questions to ask when I get there. I have started collecting various resource materials... AP has a done some very solid work on getting basic details about the detainees out into the public domain through FOIA requests, and I found I could access some of this material through this portal (scroll down right sidebar.) I've been checking out as much as I can of the sgreat reporting by the Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg and the websites of the big human rights organizations, and I've been talking to a few people... If JWN readers have other great ideas how I can prepare for the trip, let me know.
Gitmo's like something out of Jon. Swift.
Where it is, out there on the skinny edge of Cuba. It's on Cuba for crying out loud. On the island of Cuba. I can't get past that.
Aside from Amy Goodman I can't think of anyone I'd rather have reporting from there though.
Is it to create a nice gloss on the new and open but still necessary whatever-it-is-that's-happening-there?
Good luck, break a leg, all that.
Helena, are there any rules, understandings or agreements about what you can or cannot write about? You'd tell us, wouldn't you?
A number of the early Gitmo detainees have been released over the years, particularly the elderly among them. Have you had a chance to speak to any of those who were released or their families or their lawyers? I would think they would be able to give you a helpful orientation to Gitmo-in-the-past as opposed to the new-and-approved-Gitmo. I know some journalists abroad who may be able to help with contacts.
Also it would be worth having a conversation with the attorneys who represented Hamdan in the successful Supreme Court case. I think the name of the military appointed attorney was Charles Swift, and he worked with a young professor at Georgetown Law School. They would be worth contacting.
Good stuff! I completely agree with your observation:
I think it is a strength of people in a democratic culture to be able to reach out and maintain respectful relations and communications with people with whom one might expect to disagree.
and it stands in stark contrast with the intollerance for disagreement of the dark side, for example what is happening in France:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5393892.stm
French critic of Islam in hiding
Muslims protest against the Pope Benedict's remark in Pakistan (file image)
Despite apologies, Pope Benedict's remarks provoked anger
France's anti-terrorism authorities have launched an enquiry into death threats against a philosophy teacher who wrote an article criticising Islam.
Robert Redeker has been forced into hiding after making controversial marks about the Prophet Muhammad.
Writing in France's Le Figaro, Mr Redeker described the religion's founder as "a merciless war leader".
Since publishing the article, he has been under police protection and forced to move between safe houses.
On Friday, the Paris prosecutor's office said it had opened a preliminary investigation into the threats to see if they were linked to terrorist activity.
Helena. If you cannot talk to any of the illegally abducted and incarcerated inmates, in private, then you have no reason to go. You only provide willing window dressing for the despicable.
Just keep in mind the conversation between Edmond Dantes and the sadistic warden of the Chateau D'If in the movie "The Count of Monte Cristo." When the wrongly accused and secretly imprisoned Dantes asks: "What is my crime?" He gets the response: "That is state business. That information is privileged." When he protests: "I am innocent," the warden sardonically replies: "Of course you are. If you were truly guilty, there are a hundred prisons in France where they could lock you away. Chateau D'If is where they put the ones they're ashamed of."
I shouldn't have to remind you or anyone else that America has a perfectly functional justice system: one capable of trying and convicting any truly guilty person on the basis of public, factual evidence. As well, America has hundreds of prisons where we could lock such persons away for the duration of their just sentences. As in Napoleonic France, however, Chateau D'If Guantanamo exists for George W. Bush to hide away from public view those wrongfully imprisoned souls whose pathetic plight brings nothing but shame and embarassment to any self-styled American in any way associated with the rank injustice of it all.
If you cannot obtain your own, unsupervised view of these men and their condition, then your gawking presence outside their cages will only make them feel even more like animals on display at the zoo.
You might also try keeping in mind the stirring words of that unreconstructed socialist, Eugene V. Debs: "While there is a working class, I am of it. While there is a criminal class, I am in it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Try not to stare to long or too hard at the caged animals; and if you have to turn your head away in shame, then you should ask yourself why you came in the first place. Prisons make prisoners of us all.
Good stuff Michael!
But you're being too hard on Helena. She should go and write about whatever she is and is not allowed to see. What else is a reporter to do?
There have been some pretty thorough and scathing accounts of watching these military kangaroo courts we've set up down there that appeared on the ACLU blog.
BBC had a good interview with one of the lawyers about how this stuff really works in the wake of the passage of the torture authorization and impunity bill. You got all this process and it all looks like legality -- and then at some point the government says "that's secret--national security blah,blah,blah" and there is a lot of dickering and the "judge" rules for the government and that's that.
I'm glad you are going in the sense that few can -- and I also fear that you are just legitimate something incomprehensibly evil.
"Of course, I shall be writing as fully about what I am not allowed to see and do at Gitmo as about what I am allowed to see and do." How can you write as fully about what you don't see as about what you do see? Will this be some kind of mystical experience ?
The new law guts habeas corpus and legalizes torture, and you describe it as the "newly-legislated ground rules for the new Military Commissions"?
Why am I thinking of Brecht and Kafka here...
She is going because there is no risk involved and it promotes her career. Going to places like Daniel Pearl went and take a risk, that she won't do.
Gitmo, Gaza, Europe, sure. Never to Iraq, no interviews with radicals in Pakistan, no Taliban in Afghanistan. What I call journalistic onanism.
David, Davis, or whatever you're calling yourself these days, you really have no knowledge at all about the profession of journalism, the circumstances or even the facts of my career (which once again you've gotten wrong), or my motivations.
These issues and decisions are serious and hard ones to think through without you coming on here spouting your ill-informed and hostile venom. Please desist.
Come back if you have anything constructive or well-informed to say.
JC, your... Helena, are there any rules, understandings or agreements about what you can or cannot write about? You'd tell us, wouldn't you? The answer is yes.
Helena, You might be interested in this comment by a regular contributor to the Mondediplo blog of Alain Gresch (http://blog.mondediplo.com). He thinks you could be locked up without recourse under this law for saying on your blog that you think Hizbollah is or Hamas is a legitimate national-resistance group. You might wonder about that, but the point is that if the government takes you, where will you make your argument? And you think you should be a guest of the authors of this law on a tour of their prison facilities? What kind of a relationship do you think that will foster with your readers?
La torture légalisée depuis hier au USA
29 septembre 2006 09:42, par Pierre BLEUE
Hier la junte bushiste a fait voté au Senat américain un texte autorisant la torture contre toute personnes soupçonnées d’armer, de financer ou d’apporter leur soutien à des organisations considérées comme terroristes.
En clair si par exemple vous affirmez que le Hezbollah ou le Hamas ne sont pas ou ne sont plus des organisations terroristes mais de simples mouvements de résistance sur votre blog, cela peut etre considéré comme une forme de soutien, alors où que vous soyez dans le monde la CIA s’arroge le droit de vous séquestrer et de vous torturer, maintenant en toute légalité, du moins d’un point de vue américain.
Le nombre de personnes qui trouvent légitime la résistance armée du Hamas ou du Hezbollah (tout en regrettant leur reliosité un peu carricaturale) face à l’ultra terrorisme israélien doit bien avoisiner le milliard d’individus, autant de cible potentielles pour la Gestapo US !
Helena,
I expressed my opinion as a long time observer on this board. You may disagree, but my impression is that most of your writing is blended with perosoanl details about your travles, your interviews, your meetings, your spouse, your influencial friends that are seldom found in any serious journalism and in my humble opinion smell of self promotion. I am not trying to impress anybody with personal life but neither are easily impressed by self agrandazing of others.
I would be happy to keep using the same name if you stop filtering and deleting my posts.
If you disagree with my observation that you shy away from dangerous places, let's hear why. Every ranked amateur journalist has been to Iraq. You are writing about Iraq for three years with second hand information.
Davis. You. Are. A. Cad.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Ask to see the records which purport to state the charges against the detainees, the numbers of hearings or interrogations they have endured, plus the supposed findings thereby revealed. The interrogation staff may prefer to use traditional masks and not reveal names, but might they say something about their prior career fields and what attracts them to their current work? Do they enjoy a surge of vindication each time the suspect is dunked or goes another day without sleep? Or, at this point, might some of the detainees fear for their lives if sent back home? There might be some ambiguity. Might 'Gitmo be less severe than the jails of Cairo or Jedda?