Ingratitude

by

by hilzoy

CharleyCarp, in comments, notes this story from the Miami Herald:

“Nearly a year after an uprising in a communal camp for ”war on terrorism” captives in this remote U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba, most detainees live in maximum-security lockdown — in windowless, fluorescent-lighted cells — a stark contrast to four years of open-air camp confinement.

And lockdown life amounts to this: five prayer calls a day; three meals handed through a slot in the cell door; two hours, at most, of solo recreation inside a pen, with four other captives in adjoining chain-link cages, and a once-a-week cell-door visit from a library cart. (…)

The turning point toward single-occupancy lockdown conditions came a year ago, the most violent period the prison camps had ever seen.

On May 18, two captives were found unconscious in their open-air cells, attempting suicide from prescription drugs hoarded by other detainees. Later that day, dozens of detainees in minimum-security quarters ripped metal out of their communal bunkhouse three camps away and attacked guards.

No one was seriously hurt, but on June 10 guards spotted three Arabs simultaneously hanging in their cells from improvised nooses — apparent suicides that the prison camps commander, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, declared “asymmetric warfare.”

Lawyers said the bunkhouse brawl was triggered by a source of repeated unrest across all five years — speculation that guards would search their holy Korans, this time for hidden drugs.

Harris and intelligence officials cast it as a wake-up call to a dormant, conspiring and secret leadership bent on embarrassing the U.S. military, which boasts safe, humane and transparent conditions at the site.

“No matter what we do for them, they don’t appreciate it,” said an Arab named Zaki, the U.S. military’s cultural advisor.”

Gosh, those ungrateful prisoners. Years of imprisonment without trial, without the ability to let their friends and families know they’re alive, without hope, and now with scarcely any human contact, and they’re still ungrateful! And we gave them lemon chicken!

For another view of Camp Six, I’ll quote from a brief I cited in an earlier post:

“The January 15 meeting was my third meeting with Abdusemet. In previous meetings he had struck me as a kindly man, quite gentle, pleasant in affect, calm, and prone to smile and laugh. On January 15 he appeared extremely anxious. His foot tapped the floor uncontrollably. His affect was deeply sad. He refused offers of the food we had brought. He appeared to be in despair.
He said Camp 6 was “the dungeon above the ground.” He said that when they led him into Camp 6, he recalled a movie he had once seen aout a Nazi concentration camp, “a place where, when they take you in, you never come out.” (…)

Abdusemet asked us to communicate a message from one of the other Uighurs on his pod to his wife: “Tell her to remarry. She should consider me dead.”

Abdusemet asked me, “What did we do? Why do they hate us so much?” (…)

Abdusemet advised that one of the other Uighurs on his block was “hearing voices,” and had been shouting out indiscriminately. Abdusemet said the man had been punished by being forced to wear the orange jumpsuit.

Abdusemet said, “I am starting to hear voices, sometimes. There is no one to talk to in my cell and I hear these voices.””

And yet, for some reason, they don’t appreciate our generosity. Go figure.

15 thoughts on “Ingratitude”

  3. I know i’m beating a dead horse here, but don’t miss the bigger picture set out in the last four paragraphs of the Herald excerpt. Our military tried really hard to be nice, but those prisoners got nasty and hanged themselves. After that, our leadership woke up to just how mean the prisoners can be, killing themselves to embarrass their captors. So they decide that conditions are too good.
    Our military will be centuries washing away the stain. If the top few levels of leadership, of course including Rumsfeld and Bush, don’t spend the rest of their lives in prison then I don’t think we can have any self-respect as a nation after this.

  4. Ah yes. The one year anniversary of the “acts of asymmetric warfare” is approaching.
    Harris’ insanity aside, I remember thinking that the human rights community wasn’t being totally accurate either. There are people at Guantanamo who are simply depressed and suicidal and despairing; some of them have made repeated suicide attempts. But the coordination of these particular suicides
    suggested that they were a protest, intended to mobilize public opposition against the camp. A combination of despair (the belief that they personally were not going to get out alive) and lack of despair (the belief that their deaths could contribute to other prisoners getting out).
    The Arab “cultural advisor” has said something similar:

    The advisor, who cannot be identified because of military rules and concerns for his family’s safety, attributes the suicides to a misguided rumor that an act of martyrdom would result in the rest of Guantanamo’s prisoners being freed.
    “They thought they were doing good, that they were sacrificing themselves,” he said. “They thought there would be planes lined up to take the others away.”
    Since the suicides had no effect, “I don’t think it will happen again,” he said. “The world didn’t respond the way they thought it would.”

    There were also reports of one of the prisoners having what he believed to be a prophetic dream, about how it would take three prisoners’ deaths to close the camp.
    I remember, when I edited Margulies’ chapter about “manipulative self-injurious behavior”, “hanging gestures” and the hunger strikes, thinking that you couldn’t get any less powerless than that….locked in a prison where your only recourse was to try to starve yourself to death or commit suicide. But it is in fact possible to physically prevent people from continuing a hunger strike and from killing themselves. And in order to commit suicide as an act of political protest as opposed to an expression of personal despair, you probably have to believe someone’s going to care. They’re less common in totalitarian countries than in the West, I think.
    The three who killed themselves probably thought their deaths would improve things for the other prisoners; instead it led us to conclude that they were hardened terrorists ungratefully engaging in “assymmetric warfare”. It helped make Camp Six into what it is.
    In a way, they overestimated us.

  5. OT, but highly interesting. Former Deputy Attorney General’s testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the efforts to keep the domestic surveillence program afloat over DoJ objections to the point of threatened mass resignations.

  6. The funny thing is, the only thing that surprises me even a little about that is that we’re finding out.
    Huzzah for subpoena power; best use of it so far.

  11. Cleek, if that is true we can only hope that his stated beliefs were wrong or he will find himself in very unpleasant place (and not be the one in charge).

  12. And we gave them lemon chicken!
    Which is itself a lie:

    In any event, all of my clients were very, very hungry. Each day, I would bring each food. I have never seen men eat with such reverence. Whatever I brought them—pizza, sandwiches, dates, chips, pastry, candy– not a crumb was wasted. It was a very poignant experience watching men, who had been deprived for so long, eat. The government insists that it serves the prisoners dishes like rice pilaf and lemon chicken. Like everything else the military says, it is an arrant lie. I remember telling Bisher the story. He laughed, telling me that he could state definitively that he had never even tasted lemon the entire time he had been in Guantanamo.

    That’s Brent Mickum, a lawyer for Guantanamo prisoners, two now released and one still held. Another in the now substantial series of interviews by Seth Farber, the Talking Dog, of lawyers and others involved in the defense of those held by the U.S. government as part of the “war on terror,” which can be found linked at the bottom of the post in my link above.

  13. So, basically, this “most violent period the prison camps had ever seen” consisted almost entirely of people trying to kill themselves and one coordinated uprising that amounted to nothing. It’s hardly the stuff of wingnut nightmares, is it?

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