The Gitmo Myth And The Torture Canard

The Gitmo Myth
and the Torture
Canard
The closing of a detention camp amid false accusations of abuse
was the culmination of a brilliant campaign by activist lawyers.
By Arthur Herman

O
N JANUARY 21, 2009, Pres- “war on terror” and a restoration of America’s moral
ident Barack Obama issued standing. The response was electric. The facility at Guan-
his first executive order: tánamo (Gitmo for short) had become “America’s most
He was closing the deten- notorious prison,” as Fox News put it. In the minds of
tion center at the Guantá- many, it was the American equivalent of the Bastille or
namo Bay Naval Base in the KGB’s Lubyanka prison: a dungeon used to isolate,
Cuba and calling a halt to intimidate, and torture generally hapless inmates, many
the military commissions of whom were innocent of any crime against the United
created in late 2001 to try States. Dana Priest of the Washington Post took to the
terrorist suspects detained there. Like the startling paper’s front page to proclaim joyously that “with the
opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, Obama’s ac- stroke of his pen,” Obama had “effectively declared an
tion was intended to herald a new tone in America’s end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush
had defined it.” Now Obama could begin the process of
Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill was a rehabilitating America’s image around the world, the
finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in general non- very image Gitmo had done so much to blacken.
fiction. His last article for Commentary was “The Then several strange things happened. Obama’s
Return of Carterism?” (January 2009). order “closing” Gitmo actually left it open for a year,

Commentary 13

ostensibly until new arrangements could be made for into consideration are the aggressive and unending ef-
the 240 or so inmates still detained there—though forts of a cadre of lawyers, activists, left-leaning Demo-
Obama admitted privately it might have to stay open crats in Congress, and civil libertarians against the
longer than that. Later, Attorney General Eric Holder facility, its purpose, its goal, and its existence. These
announced that, far from being “the Bermuda Triangle efforts began even before it was opened, in November
of human rights” that Human Rights Watch’s Wendy 2001, and continue to this day. The anti-Gitmo forces
Patten had dubbed it, Gitmo was in full compliance worked tirelessly to shape the public perception that
with the humane-treatment provisions of the Geneva Gitmo was the red-hot center of an aggressive policy
Convention. Meanwhile, the military commissions, approach that led the leftist financier George Soros to
which Human Rights Watch and others groups had declare: “The biggest terrorist in the world is George
denounced as a travesty of justice, were only being sus- W. Bush.”
pended for 120 days, pending a review—and, indeed, The enemies of Bush and Gitmo have succeeded
following that review, will be reinstated almost exactly brilliantly. But in so doing, they have done grave vio-
as they were before. lence to the truth about the Guantánamo Bay facility,
If one adds to this mix: have aided in the release of prisoners who have since
• the twelve separate inquiries into the abuses committed acts of terrorism outside the United States,
alleged by critics and former detainees at Gitmo that and may yet succeed in having Barack Obama’s gov-
found no evidence of those abuses taking place; ernment release young men with terrifying ambitions
• the revelation during the release earlier this for murder and mass destruction onto the soil of the
year of the so-called “torture memos” that waterboard- United States.
ing and other harsh interrogation techniques had been
applied to exactly three suspects in the course of eight IN OCTOBER 2001, the Unit-
years and had never been standard operating practice Why ed States invaded Afghani-
at Gitmo;
• the evaluation by the Combating Terrorism Gitmo? stan to crush the al-Qaeda
terrorists who had free run
Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detain- of the country and the Taliban government that was
ees were “a demonstrated threat” to Americans; housing them. Within weeks, the U.S. military found
• and, finally, the fact that the detention facility itself holding tens of thousands of prisoners, including
was created in the wake of a declaration by Congress foreign al-Qaeda fighters who had been training in ter-
in September 2001 that “all necessary and appropriate rorist camps in the Afghan hinterland.
force” should be used “against those nations, organiza- The tale would later be told that many of these
tions, or persons” [emphasis added] responsible for prisoners were hapless shepherds, farmers, and even
the attacks of September 11; tourists caught up in the fighting, and that the North-
—one may be permitted to wonder why, exactly, ern Alliance, the Afghan guerrilla group with which
the pressure to close the prison facility has been so the United States was allied in the fight against the
intense and long-lasting. Taliban, was handing over innocent men whom they
The standard argument is that the public shift falsely dubbed al-Qaeda members in order to collect a
in attitude toward Gitmo was gradual, and reflected money bounty.
a growing disillusionment with the war on terror as In point of fact, the military captured more than
the sordid details of how George W. Bush and his as- 70,000 men and put every one through a rigorous
sistants chose to wage it came out, including the sup- screening process. Ten thousand were released im-
posed secret use of torture. Once the detention center mediately. By the time the military had completed its
had become a cesspool of human-rights abuse, the evil work, only 800 remained in custody. These were the
spawned there then seeped into other facilities where ones they had deemed hard-core trained terrorists
prisoners in the Bush war on terror were being held, who could not be released without running the risk
most notoriously the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib. In they would rejoin the battle. The question was what to
2004, former Vice President Al Gore announced that do with them.
Abu Ghraib “was not the result of random acts by a From the beginning, the Department of Defense
‘few bad apples’: it was the natural consequence of the and its head, Donald Rumsfeld, were deeply reluctant
Bush administration policy” of retaining and interro- to take on the job of detaining these prisoners who,
gating inmates at Gitmo. unlike normal POWs, fought for no country, wore no
What this account and others like it fail to take uniforms, and had systematically broken the rules of

14 The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard : June 2009

war. In a conventional war, prisoners are held to keep In the end, addressing all these legal questions
them from being returned to the fight. The problem fell to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel
here was that there was no conventional battlefield; (OLC), then led by John Yoo.
in a war of terror, a combatant can theoretically strike
anywhere in the world. It was not clear to anyone YOO WAS TASKED with pro-
what was to be done with this new model of stateless The viding a set of ground rules
combatant. Rumsfeld “hated the idea of being a jailer,”
as his aide Douglas Feith relates in his memoir, War Memos for detention, interrogation,
and trial of the detainees.
and Decision, in large measure owing to the fact that The Department of Defense had wanted to treat these
they were not automatically covered under the Geneva as three separate issues. However, Yoo and the OLC
Convention. Deciding how they were to treated or lawyers believed they had to be handled as parts of a
tried posed immense legal difficulties that no lawyer at single policy—especially since at the same time they
the Department of Defense was eager to take on. were also setting guidelines on how the CIA would be
Finding a place to put them proved the easy part. allowed to question suspects that fell into its hands.
In 1987, a prison had been set up for the United States Those rules and memos were assembled over
Southern Command at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The the course of many months bridging 2001 and 2002,
site was a military location and therefore secure—so in the immediate shadow of 9/11 with the possibility
secure that eventually the CIA transferred its “high- of a second massive attack looming on the horizon.
value” al-Qaeda detainees like Khalid Sheikh Moham- Later, the press would brand them “torture memos,”
med there. It was not in a Muslim country, which less- and the Obama administration’s decision to release
ened the possibility of a prison break or other political the full texts of those memos in April 2009 fed the
complications. Finally, it was under United States con- frenzy. However, they could just as well be branded
trol but not on United States
soil—which, according to a c c
1950 Supreme Court decision
in Johnson v. Eisentrager,
meant that prisoners could Yoo’s work would be
be lawfully brought under
American custody from vari-
condemned as the “torture
ous international locations memos” upon their release,
to be detained and processed
without the involvement of
but they could just as well
civil courts. be branded “anti-torture
Gitmo was never meant
to be a prison where inmates
memos.”
were to serve sentences for
crimes. It was, in the words of
a Defense Department docu-
ment, a detention facility set up in order to prevent “anti-torture memos.” Yoo and his colleagues used
“enemy combatants from continuing the fight against them to define the boundaries at which interroga-
the US. and its partners in the war on terror.” Its goals tion of unwilling and uncooperative prisoners would
were military and tactical, not juridical or penal. Still, cross over into the category of torture. Once those
the conditions under which these unconventional boundaries were breached, any action would be il-
prisoners were to be held did involve questions. legal under United States law and international trea-
The questions were especially complex because ties, including the 1994 United Nations Convention
the facility became a place where military, FBI, and CIA Against Torture. They looked to practices by Israeli as
interrogators would all become involved in question- well as British intelligence services that had under-
ing al-Qaeda suspects to determine who was guilty of gone legal scrutiny in their own countries, and they
involvement in the 9/11 plot and whether other attacks also considered historical norms about torture since
were being planned or were imminent. Since all these the Middle Ages.
agencies operate under different legal strictures, sort- The OLC understood as well as any of its later
ing out who could do what was immensely difficult. critics that torture—the cruel and needless infliction

Commentary 15

of pain in order to dominate and control others or to prisoners captured in Iraq). Al-Qaeda recruits are
exact confessions or information—was barbarism. It trained in the arts of conspiracy, assassination, and
was precisely in order to prevent such barbarism that murder. A system of open barracks, as in a conven-
the memos were drawn up in the first place. It was also tional POW camp, would allow detainees to organize
why then, and later, army and CIA interrogators tried plots, even rebellions, within the compounds (orga-
to avoid even drawing close to those boundaries with- nizing riots in a POW camp is a violation of Common
out explicit authorization. Article 3 of the Convention), and to take vengeance on
Critics further assert that the OLC memos “de- their own number who were suspected of confessing
nied” Geneva Convention status to the al-Qaeda and or cooperating with American authorities. Detention
Taliban prisoners at Gitmo. One key lawyer, Michael in separate cells, as in a conventional prison, seemed
Ratner, has claimed that by “ignoring” the Geneva the only way to overcome this logistical nightmare.
Convention in this way, the Justice Department rules The rules on Gitmo detention and on interroga-
were in “violation of half a century of U.S. precedent.” tion constituted a valiant attempt to deal with an un-
This is incorrect. Yoo and the OLC were not mak- precedented legal situation. The same was true of the
ing policy in the memos. They were attempting to system of military “commissions” or tribunals for trying
describe the law as it stood. As Yoo has pointed out, suspects at Gitmo. Here the Justice Department largely
it was up to the president and the president alone followed the precedent of tribunals used by the Ameri-
to decide whether the Gitmo prisoners should be can military during World War II, and upheld by the U.S.
treated in accordance with Geneva Convention stan- Supreme Court in its 1942 decision Ex Parte Quirin.
dards (which he did, in 2002). The prisoners in no Again, critics of the tribunals would accuse Yoo
way fit the standard of “lawful combatant” as defined and the Bush administration of trying to make an end
by the Geneva Convention’s Common Article 3 and run around the United States criminal-justice system
by establishing a separate
c c judicial review process for
terror suspects and turning
Gitmo into a secret offshore
The rules on Gitmo detention haven outside the
scrutiny of the American
detention and on justice system. In fact, Yoo
interrogation comprised a and his colleagues were try-
ing to protect the American
valiant attempt to deal legal system from stepping
with an unprecedented into a political-military
minefield. Imagine that the
legal situation. Gitmo terrorists had been
put into the standard crim-
inal-justice system, with its
time-consuming rules about
therefore could not automatically be accorded the due process, habeas corpus, and countless appeals.
treatment the Convention required. Indeed, because Imagine, further, that in the course of all this there
they were not in uniform and were fighting under no had been a second major attack like 9/11, or an al-
flag, the rules applying specifically to that category Qaeda-inspired riot occurred in a U.S. prison that
could not apply without violating the sense of the had involved the taking or murdering of hostages.
Convention itself—although that did not mean they There would have been immense public pressure
could be treated in any way the Gitmo guards and for the administration to “do something,” to bend
commandant saw fit. or break normal rules in the interest of swift justice.
There were other practical reasons for refusing That highly plausible scenario, made reality, would
to treat the Gitmo prisoners like German or Italian have threatened the integrity of the American justice
POWs in World War II, or somewhat later, Iraqi sol- system. The commissions were intended as a prophy-
diers captured in Operation Iraqi Freedom (no one, lactic means of protecting the American legal system
then or later, ever suggested that the Geneva Conven- from an unprecedented situation it was not designed
tion, including Common Article 3, did not apply to to manage.


The plan backfired. The enemies of the Bush the idea in the public’s mind that most, if not all, of
White House and the war on terror were working on these inmates might be innocent victims, picked up on
their own political agenda, involving an attack on the the battlefield by mistake.
Gitmo system through the courts. The inmates themselves were happy to oblige.
Shafiq Rasul, for example, told Ratner and anyone

Enter, WHEN PRESIDENT
Bush announced in
who would listen that he was no terrorist. He was
an innocent tourist whom the Taliban had abducted

Stage Left November 2001 the
establishment of the
while he was traveling in Afghanistan, and that dur-
ing the American invasion he had been forced to take
detention center and plans for military commissions up an AK-47 to use in self-defense. Rasul’s story and
to try cases, Michael Ratner of the Center for Consti- similar ones told by two other Gitmo captives born
tutional Rights was furious. “The idea that you could in the English town of Tipton, Ruhal Ahmed and Afiq
pick up people anywhere in the world and hold them Iqal (later known as the Tipton Three), became the
forever without a trial is outrageous,” he later told the centerpiece of Ratner’s campaign to open the gates at
magazine Mother Jones. Ratner immediately began Gitmo. Their picture adorns his 2007 book, The Trial of
organizing an effort to offer legal counsel to the first Donald Rumsfeld.
detainees, and organized teams of attorneys working Clearly, Ratner insisted, an injustice had been
pro bono from some of Washington’s largest law firms done to these and other foreign nationals caught in the
to bring suit on behalf of the detainees. American net after the war in Afghanistan. The fact
Ratner is a veteran of the ideological wars in- that Bush had excluded Gitmo from normal judicial
side the United States. The Center for Constitutional review meant that the innocent were bound to suffer,
Rights was founded by the late William Kunstler, who while the remote location of Gitmo ensured that they
had served as defense attorney for the Chicago Seven, were left to the mercy of their jailers.
the Black Panthers, and other violent radical groups. Ratner’s portrait of Gitmo’s detainees was
Ratner himself had been at the head of the National wildly off the mark. But it did reflect the fact that, in its
Lawyers Guild, once a Stalinist front group, before early months, conditions at Gitmo were chaotic. The
representing Fidel Castro, members of Hamas, and population of the naval base had swelled from 2,000
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh who organized to 10,000, among them military personnel, FBI, CIA,
the original bombing of the World Trade Center back Army as well as Drug Enforcement Agency interroga-
in 1993. One of Ratner’s colleagues, Lynne Stewart, tors, doctors, Arab translators, and Muslim chaplains,
was eventually convicted of providing material aid to and of course, the detainees themselves. One of the
Rahman while acting as an officer of the court. Ratner first structures in the prison camp was a trailer for the
publicly defended Stewart’s actions, and was a dedi- International Commission for the Red Cross, which
cated foe of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. had full access to the detainees and collected mail to
Ratner’s allies in the fight for the detainees be sent to their relatives.
included Islamist lobbying groups willing to spread New soldiers and units were constantly rotating
the notion that the Gitmo detainees were victims of through. No one had yet properly defined how Gitmo
racial and religious discrimination; liberal lawyers at would function as both a detention and an interroga-
prestigious Washington firms who had been taught by tion facility. In addition, there were no rules on how
their law professors that the law’s role is to effect social to punish inmates who attacked their guards or oth-
and political change and who wished to do something erwise violated camp rules. There was, and never has
more meaningful than work on corporate mergers; been, a disciplinary system for prisoners at Gitmo. To
and eventually a Democratic party understandably this day prisoners are not punished for their crimes or
looking for an issue it could use to undermine public offenses, even when they attack guards or pelt them
support for George Bush (running in the mid-80s in with feces.
early 2002) and get them back in the political game. In fact, before Major General Geoffrey Miller
In February 2002 Ratner filed his first petition took charge as commandant in November 2002,
for habeas corpus for a British-born Gitmo detainee Gitmo was, according to one eyewitness, “an island
named Shafiq Rasul—a petition that would have fate- of divided loyalties and waning morale.” The environ-
ful consequences two years later. At the time, however, ment had grown so stale and hermetic that it became
the focus of Ratner and his allies was not torture or the a breeding ground of rumor about unorthodox and
interrogations at Gitmo. Instead, they worked to plant bizarre interrogation tactics, including inmates who

Commentary 17

claimed they were being slapped, shouted at, or military’s attempts at breaking Qahtani’s will, which
subjected to loud music; interrogators pretending to included yelling, calling him names, subjecting him to
defecate on the Koran; and female interrogators sit- sleep deprivation and loud music, and duct-taping his
ting on detainees’ laps in order to humiliate them, or cell shut. “It was stupid and ineffective,” Paul Rester
splashing them with red ink pretending it was men- later said. “But it wasn’t torture or abuse.”
strual blood. Every one of these was investigated and However, one FBI agent saw the guards bring a
proved false, but the rumors were passed along by FBI growling dog into the interrogation room, which he
interrogators in memos that expressed concern about assumed was being used to intimidate Qahtani—al-
Gitmo interrogation tactics being used by personnel though subsequent investigation showed that dogs at
working for other cabinet agencies. They seemed to Gitmo were used to escort prisoners back and forth to
verify the picture painted by Ratner and others that their cells, not to threaten them. Since that detail was
the facility was reeling out of control. included in the FBI e-mails, and later leaked, the idea
that dogs were used to abuse prisoners would become

Three IN POINT OF FACT,
the main problem
a fixture in the false portrait that was being painted of
the goings-on at Gitmo.

Categories was that Gitmo was
proving an ineffec-
Interrogators were still getting nowhere, so on
October 11, 2002, the head of the Southern Command,
tive facility when it came to uncovering intelligence. General James Hill, was asked to approve an enhanced
Given the hardened nature of the terrorists being held interrogation schedule, divided into three categories
there, and the urgency of getting information from of coercion beyond those covered in the U.S. Army field
them, an experienced Army interrogator named Paul manual:
Rester (who arrived at Gitmo in 2002) had assumed Category I, yelling and deception.
that the “gloves would be off” in interrogation tactics. Category II, stress positions for up to four hours,
To his shock, he found the rules were stricter even than light deprivation, removal of clothing, shaving of facial
the Army field manual’s: “It was a much more restric- hair (very shaming to a Muslim male), and exploitation
tive environment than anywhere else I’ve conducted of fear phobias, including fear of dogs.
interrogations.” Prisoners were allowed to defy their Category III, “the use of scenarios” to convince
questioners and treat them with contempt, even as the detainee that his life is in danger, including water-
FBI and Army interrogators were often working at boarding.
cross-purposes. On November 15, against FBI objections, Hill
Perhaps the best case study was that of Muham- approved the use of Categories I and II, but not Cat-
mad el-Qahtani, a Saudi national caught by U.S. forces egory III. He also approved a plan for applying them to
on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in Decem- Qahtani by degrees on a thirty-day schedule beginning
ber 2001. Like other al-Qaeda operatives, Qahtani on November 23. On December 2, Rumsfeld weighed
claimed that he was an innocent man who had only in with his own authorization, which, again, did not
been visiting Afghanistan to buy and sell falcons. In- include waterboarding. Rumsfeld had his doubts in
terest in Qahtani changed abruptly in July 2002, when any case, and on January 15 rescinded his authoriza-
the FBI learned that he was the same Qahtani who had tion pending further review.
been denied entry at Orlando Airport on a flight from Still, that proved to be enough time to break
Canada on August 4, 2001—and that Muhammad Atta, Qahtani. He was subjected to 20-hour interrogation
mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, had been waiting at sessions, being tied to a dog leash (no actual dogs were
Orlando Airport that same day. involved), having water poured continually on his
Suddenly deemed a “high-value” detainee, Qa- head (but no waterboarding), while women’s clothes
htani was moved on orders of the Navy to its brig on were dropped on his face and a bra strapped across his
the base for isolation. There the FBI took charge and clothed chest. These and other humiliations, includ-
for 30 days carried on a desultory interrogation with ing turning up the air-conditioning to uncomfortable
its usual, buttoned-down, fully Miranda-warning- levels, did result in Qahtani’s brief hospitalization in
inspired style of criminal investigation—and got no- early December with brachyocardia. However, none
where. remotely approached the definition of torture defined
After thirty days, the Army stepped in and took by the OLC’s August 2002 memo as administering
charge. The FBI was furious at its removal from the physical pain equal to the intensity “accompanying
case, and its investigators sent e-mails decrying the serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impair-


ment of bodily function, or even death,” or psychologi- Qahtani were standard practice at Gitmo for all de-
cal harm “lasting for months or even years.” tainees; and that far from being reluctant to use these
By then, Qahtani had confessed that he worked techniques even within the guidelines set out by the
for al Qaeda. One by one, without hesitation, he picked OLC, the Defense Department couldn’t wait to use
out pictures of all nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers and them. Still, those counterclaims gained little traction
called out their names—and admitted that he, not Za- until the revelations about Abu Ghraib broke in the
carias Moussaoui, had been slated to be the twentieth spring of 2004.
hijacker. He also revealed that the true mastermind
of the attack was Osama bin Laden’s deputy Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed. Qahtani also fingered another Abu IT IS IMPORTANT to remem-
ber that the exposure of the
Saudi al-Qaeda operative, Adnan el-Shukrijumah,
who was in the United States organizing another Ghraib abuses at Abu Ghraib came
not from a reporter or human-
9/11-style attack for the summer of 2004. Khalid Mo- rights advocate or international agency, but from
hammed’s subsequent capture in Pakistan in March within the Department of Defense itself. It was the
2003 revealed still more details which, we now know, classic case of a government agency learning about
enabled the Bush administration to foil a second wave abuses and violations of specific guidelines, thor-
of suicide attacks directed at Los Angeles. oughly investigating the abuse, alerting higher-ups of
Whether Qahtani’s interrogation constituted the problem, and then dismissing and punishing those
“torture” might be a matter of debate, but not, it seems, responsible—while developing additional guidelines
to the new Obama administration. For according to an to prevent it from happening again. The Abu Ghraib
argument advanced by Obama’s Justice Department in investigation, in short, was government at its most
May regarding the possibility that the concentration- responsive and effective.
camp guard John Demjanjuk
would be tortured were he to c c
be deported to Germany, the
Qahtani interrogation could
not be judged to have risen
Coerced interrogations
to the standard of torture were the extreme exception,
because meeting that stan-
dard would have required
not the standard practice,
“his prospective torturer [to] and the administration was
have the motive or purpose”
of inflicting extreme pain and
prepared to withdraw
suffering. That was certainly permission for them almost
not the case with Qahtani.
By any standard, his in-
immediately.
terrogation had also yielded
valuable, actionable intelli-
gence that saved American lives. It also established All the same, it was a propaganda gold mine for
two unquestionable facts about Gitmo. The first was Ratner and his allies. Now they could attach a series of
that coerced interrogations were the extreme excep- disturbing visual images to their stories about treat-
tion, not standard practice, at the facility. The other ment of Gitmo detainees—in fact, in The Trial of Donald
was that Rumsfeld and the Bush administration were Rumsfeld, Ratner has exterior pictures of prisoners at
extremely reluctant to endorse any of these tech- Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray followed immediately by interior
niques, to the point of overriding the wishes of their snapshots from Abu Ghraib, as if they were in actual
own officers in the field, and that the administration sequence. The implication was that what happened at
was prepared to withdraw permission for enhanced Abu Ghraib was normal procedure in Gitmo.
techniques, up to and including waterboarding, al- By that spring, also, Democrats were looking for
most as soon as they were granted. a campaign issue to derail President Bush’s reelection
However, the leaked FBI memos allowed crit- chances. The Bush administration’s “culpability” for
ics to obfuscate both these points. They felt free to Abu Ghraib was made to order. “Shamefully,” Sena-
claim that the extraordinary measures taken against tor Edward Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate,

Commentary 19

“we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers [are] to review every detainee’s case annually, critics crowed
reopened under new management: U.S. management.” in triumph. If there were no problems at Gitmo, they
Reading the FBI memos in light of the Abu Ghraib said, and the United States didn’t torture terror sus-
pictures, Senator Dick Durbin compared the Gitmo pects, then why make these adjustments at all?
jailors to Nazis and the Soviets in the gulag, henchmen It was left to Gitmo officials to respond as best
of some “mad regime—Pol Pot and others—who have they could. They pointed out that it was precisely to
no concern for human beings.” avoid abuses like Abu Ghraib that Gitmo had been set
So Democrats were quick to embrace the thesis up, and rules for detainee treatment and interrogation
put forward by Seymour Hersh in his book Chain of had been codified in the first place. They pointed out
Command: Even if Bush and Rumsfeld hadn’t actually that unlike Abu Ghraib, the Gitmo facilities had no
ordered the abuses at Abu Ghraib, still, their “hard” hidden basements or secret dungeons. Every aspect of
approach to the war on terror, denying Gitmo suspects prison life and handling of inmates happened in the
American-style civil rights and allowing coercive inter- open, with a senior commissioned officer on duty on
rogations, had created an atmosphere in which torture every block, and a senior non-commissioned officer
was condoned and even common. Hersh attempted to on every floor of every block around the clock. Gitmo’s
make this explicit by pointing out that Gitmo’s former resident “staff judge advocate was constantly on the
commandant, Geoffrey Miller, had been sent to Iraq lookout for torture or abuse,” Steve Rodriguez, the ci-
to advise on interrogations in August 2003. Here was vilian head of intelligence at Gitmo, pointed out. Every
clear evidence, Hersh and others claimed, that the allegation of abuse by a detainee had to be checked,
Bush administration had wanted to extend Gitmo’s and then checked again.
“reign of terror” into occupied Iraq. But the opposite Officials opened Guantánamo Bay to regular
was true. Miller had been sent to Iraq precisely to tours by the media and members of Congress. “Guan-
tánamo is the most transpar-
c c ent detention facility in the
world,” said Admiral Harry
Harris, who had helped to
What was the Bush draft the rules for Gitmo. It is
also the most inspected and
administration’s response to investigated. The staff could
the attacks on its own show visitors the new facili-
ties for prisoners’ recreation
integrity and that of the and prayer and point out
men and women working that the inmates had Qur’ans
in seventeen different lan-
at Gitmo? Nothing. guages, complete access to
Red Cross officials, regular
mail delivery, and a daily
menu that many Americans
make sure that American prisoner detention facilities would consider lavish. The biggest health danger at
there lived up to the rigorous standards applied at Gitmo to the inmates’ health was their steady weight
Gitmo under Miller’s tenure. gain on more than 4,000 calories a day. Some inmates
And what was the Bush administration’s re- nearly doubled their weight after arriving at the base.
sponse to these attacks on its own integrity and human- An internal Defense Department document completed
ity, and that of the men and women working at Gitmo? in 2005 that came to be called the Church Report
Nothing. (because it was overseen by an admiral named Albert
Not for the first time, the Bush White House Church) pointed out that inmates were more likely to
chose not to deign to respond directly to its critics but be injured in their intramural games than in handling
to stand on what it believed was the dignity of the pres- by the jailers.
idency by ignoring them. This proved to be a major As Captain Kyndra Miller Rotunda, a JAG lawyer
tactical mistake. Moreover, when the administration who served at Gitmo from August 2002 to March 2003,
softened the language in the original OLC definitions explained, in terms of accommodation to religious
of torture and created a series of independent boards belief and case review boards, Gitmo actually exceeds


Geneva Convention rules. At the end of Ramadan in who “touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually
2002, the staff actually considered sacrificing a goat suggestive manner.” In one case, an interrogator sat
for the detainees, but decided not to for fear of earning briefly on a detainee’s lap and put her arm on his neck.
the wrath of animal-rights groups. The tales of inmates being forced to lap dance with
Designated areas for prayer and religious prac- female interrogators, or being splashed with red ink
tice are the one place in Gitmo where inmates are as if it were menstrual blood, faded into urban legend.
left unsupervised. That is a concession never con- It was, however, far too little too late. The political
templated by Geneva Convention rules and one that Left had by now seized the moral high ground on the
officials admit is fraught with danger.* Most detainees issue, thanks to the visual images from Abu Ghraib.
see their incarceration as one more way to carry out The media were prepared to believe that any inmate
jihad by other means: attacks on guards are common, complaint of abuse was automatically valid, while
including spitting and throwing urine and feces. They any official denial (or when it was pointed out that al-
regularly threaten revenge on the families of guards Qaeda training manuals instructed captured agents to
back in the United States (one reason why officials are complain about torture and abuse) was deemed part
so careful not to allow any documents with the names of a cover-up.
of service personnel to leave the base). Guards who At the same time, any official admission of abuse
retaliate are strictly disciplined; the inmates are not. or the use of harsh interrogation techniques—as when
Gitmo detainees may also attempt suicide in or- details of Muhammed Qahtani’s interrogation were
der to achieve martyrdom, and bring adverse publicity released or when the CIA admitted in 2005 that it had
to the prison. Cells have to be regularly searched for waterboarded three subjects in its custody, and not
weapons, drugs, and other contraband that could be at Gitmo—was assumed to be the bare minimum of
used in order to injure staff or other prisoners suspect- what inmates might have suffered. Michael Ratner,
ed of cooperating with interrogators. In June 2006, for example, wrote that Qahtani’s treatment had been
three inmates managed to achieve their objective by far more severe than officials had admitted, includ-
hanging themselves in their cells. The international ing “many other methods used against him that Mr.
outcry was intense. The men were rebelling against al Qa[h]tani cannot yet discuss—and perhaps may
their abusive conditions, human-rights groups said, choose never to discuss,” because they were so offen-
and had taken their lives in despair. sive to his personal dignity.
Head jailer David Baumgarten knew better. This was indeed a new twist: that an inmate’s
He remembered an inmate, Shakir Ami, once telling silence about abuse was itself proof of how severe that
him that he had had a vision that “if we can get three abuse had been! Once the Bush administration found
martyrs here then we will win” and be released. That all its actions on prisoner detention and interrogation
did not happen. Still, Gitmo inmates clearly know how viewed through this lens, nothing could halt the ad-
to work the adverse publicity surrounding Gitmo to vance of the war on Gitmo.
their advantage, just as they know that any complaints The International Committee of the Red Cross
about torture will receive maximum visibility from the leaked testimony from inmates claiming abusive treat-
International Committee of the Red Cross and human- ment, and the claim that inmates were being tortured
rights groups. or being treated in ways that were “tantamount to
torture,” a startling but ultimately meaningless phrase,

The AS FOR the issue of abuse,
a total of twelve separate * This was demonstrated by the case of Camp Bucca in south-
ern Iraq, where inmates used their mosque (deemed off limits
Reports investigations over fifteen
months have left no linger-
to U.S. personnel) to dig an escape tunnel and build a cache of
homemade weapons, including concrete shards and bombs built
from feces, socks, and flammable hand sanitizer. When the tun-
ing doubt: Gitmo is safer and less abusive than any de-
nel was discovered in March 2005, prisoners rioted for four days,
tention facility anywhere in the United States, military injuring several U.S. soldiers; ultimately infantry units and a
or civilian. The conclusion by Lieutenant General Ran- Black Hawk helicopter had to be used to restore order. As Kyndra
dall Schmidt and Brigadier General John Furlow in a Rotunda relates in her book, Honor Bound, the Camp Bucca inci-
dent, almost completely ignored by the American press, weighed
2005 report commissioned by the Defense Department heavily on the minds of Gitmo staff.
was incontrovertible: “No torture occurred.” †
† Meanwhile, the 2004 commission headed by former Defense
The most extensive look at Gitmo practices, the
Secretary James Schlesinger cleared the Defense Department
Church report, found exactly three cases of prisoner and Bush administration of any responsibility for what had hap-
abuse, two of which involved female interrogators pened at Abu Ghraib.

Commentary 21

became common coin. (That which is “tantamount to Daily Life at Guantánamo, which decried the sup-
torture” is, by definition, not torture.) The ICRC even posed abuses that took place in the camp while Saar
asserted that attempting “to break the will of prison- had been a guard there for six months in 2002 and
ers” or “making them wholly dependent on their inter- 2003. Interviewers for CBS and Mother Jones were
rogators” crossed the line. delighted to speak to someone who claimed to be an
As all this was going on, the legal actions Mi- eyewitness to atrocities there. However, Saar himself
chael Ratner had initiated were coming to fruition in told Bill O’Reilly’s TV audience that the worst thing
the nation’s highest court. In its first ruling on these he ever saw personally was “female interrogators who
matters, which came in the case of Hamdi v. Rumsfeld acted seductively around Muslim men and such”—and
in 2004, the Supreme Court said that habeas corpus admitted that this was not some official questioning
(the right of a prisoner to seek relief in a court) only ap- technique, but one that had been suggested by a low-
plied to detainees who were United States citizens and level employee with an Arab background.
conceded that the administration could hold detainees Otherwise, Saar’s book was a rehashing of
indefinitely in an overseas facility. But it was a ruling already-published prisoner complaints dressed up as
issued the very next day, Rasul v. Bush, that had more an eyewitness account. Those who had served with
serious consequences. In Rasul, the court asserted that him at Gitmo never recalled him expressing unhappi-
the American judicial system had final jurisdiction ness with any alleged misbehavior at interrogations, at
over the question of whether detainees were being least not until his book deal was signed. Other readers,
wrongfully held. hoping for lurid tales from America’s gulag, admitted
Ratner had brought the Rasul case to the court, on Amazon.com that they were disappointed by Saar’s
and he scored a major victory. The flood of applica- rather tame stories, and had to turn elsewhere for
tions for legal representation of Gitmo detainees soon stronger stuff.
became overwhelming; some 400 lawyers connected They had many places to turn. There was Ratner’s
with Ratner’s Center for Constitutional Rights were The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld, which compared the for-
filing sixty motions at a time in favor of their clients.19 mer Secretary of Defense to a defendant at the Nurem-
Lawyer visits were to become a regular feature of life at berg Trials and John Yoo to Nazi general Wilhelm Kei-
Gitmo; outlandish tales of abuse and torture steadily tel, who had been hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. There
found new public relations platforms. was Philippe Sands’s The Torture Team, arguing that
Yet even as the Left tried to mobilize the Gitmo Bush officials from Rumsfeld and Cheney to John Yoo
issue in the election, and John Kerry called for Donald and Douglas Feith ought to be tried as war criminals.
Rumsfeld to resign over Abu Ghraib and promised Then, in the fall of 2008, New Yorker reporter
that he would close Gitmo if elected president, the Jane Mayer published The Dark Side, offering a sup-
American public in 2004 re-elected George W. Bush posed insider account of how certain Pentagon lawyers
by a comfortable margin. Once the election was over, and interrogators, fearful of being accused of condon-
over the next two years, the White House and Congress ing torture, had balked at approving certain interroga-
managed to craft a new approach to the military com- tion techniques at Gitmo. However, what Mayer’s book
missions and rules of detention. Some thought that makes clear is that what spooked military officials like
a turning point had been reached in achieving a new Alberto Mora was not the conduct at Gitmo but fear
domestic consensus on the war on terror. that they might be held legally liable for authorizing
anything that stepped outside the bounds of the U.S.
GITMO and the tor- Uniform Code of Justice or the Army field manual.
A Change ture issue remained on The stories in The Dark Side are accounts not of coura-

of Power low boil in the run-up
to the 2006 election,
geous revolt against evil, but rather revelations of the
understandable concern of officials that they might
when Democrats were able to get back control of Con- get into trouble of the sort that John Yoo and General
gress. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had Geoffrey Miller found themselves in.
largely sat on the sidelines, decided to jump on board The psychic rewards for joining the campaign
the Gitmo bandwagon and began representing detain- against Gitmo were substantial. Navy lawyer Charles
ees. A stream of books appeared by authors, including Swift, who represented detainee Salim Hamdan in
Michael Ratner, denouncing Gitmo as part of a Bush the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, said
“torture state” and “terror presidency.” in a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair that “the whole
One of the first was Erik Saar’s Inside the Wire: purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture.”


For his willingness to say something so outrageous, ated in the first place, and why the so-called “torture
something contradicted by every piece of documen- memos” had been drafted. Far from looking for a way
tary evidence we have, Swift was saluted for his to unleash the CIA and other interrogators, Bush of-
bravery and courage. “Why is it,” Swift asked, “when ficials and lawyers had focused on reining them in
we see photos of Abu Ghraib we think that it is ‘export- even as they recognized that an unprecedented global
ing Guantánamo’?” The answer to his own rhetorical conflict like the war on terror required some rethink-
question was that Swift and his allies had deliberately ing of old rules.
drawn that connection, when the record showed that All this was ignored as the Gitmo myth took hold.
none existed, in order to press their cases in the courts. That myth had crystallized around two assertions:
In the minds of many,
Ratner and others had suc-
cessfully created a new image
of the United States, in which
Gitmo had merged with Abu
Ghraib and the CIA’s “secret
prisons” into what Amnesty
International was calling
“the American gulag,” a net-
work of facilities where sup-
c c McCain promised
to close Gitmo if elected
president, but could not do
so until he had found a
place to house the terrorists.
posedly unspeakable atroci- He lost to a candidate
ties had been committed and
innocent prisoners tortured
who professed no
or made to disappear. The such worries.
dark popular image of the
Bush war on terror included
a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode in First, that Bush administration rules had made torture
which a psychiatrist contracted to help torture pris- routine at Gitmo and elsewhere; and second, that the
oners at Gitmo returns to New York to practice the very existence of Gitmo was counterproductive to the
same coercive techniques on her patients, and the war on terror and undermined our image abroad. Even
film Rendition, in which a character played by Reese the Republican candidate for president in 2008, John
Witherspoon attempts to locate her Muslim husband, McCain, promised to close Gitmo if elected president.
innocently caught up in the American Gulag, while the But, he said, he could not do so until he had found a
evil bureaucrat portrayed by Meryl Streep does every- place to house the remaining 250 dedicated terrorists
thing to prevent it. still there. McCain lost to a candidate who professed to
Virtually no one bothered to point out that “ren- have no such worries about closing Gitmo.
dition” had been invented as an interrogation ploy The time had apparently passed for the para-
during the Clinton presidency in 1995 by one of Bush’s mount consideration of national and homeland secu-
most vociferous critics, former CIA operative Michael rity. In June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled, in the 5-4
Scheuer. Indeed, Scheuer remains unashamed of his decision in Boumediene v. Bush, that that the congres-
role in pioneering a way to deal with dangerous terror- sional compromise on military commissions worked
ists who fall outside the normal jurisdiction of the U.S. out in 2006 was in violation of fundamental protec-
court system but who may have vital actionable intel- tions of habeas corpus. The ruling was especially
ligence requiring harsh interrogations that Americans shocking since only two years earlier the Court had ba-
would prefer not to do themselves or even witness. No sically directed the executive branch to pursue a deal
one asked, Scheuer remarked recently in a Washington with Congress that would, in the Court’s eyes, make the
Times article, but everyone knew the suspects who had military commissions fully legal and constitutional.
been subjected to “rendition” were being tortured and
* According to Richard Clarke’s memoirs, Against All Enemies,
in far more horrific ways than waterboarding. How- Vice President Al Gore cheered them on. Clarke tells the story of
ever, the Clinton White House, including legal counsel Gore coming to a 1993 NSC meeting where the idea of “extraor-
Leon Panetta, preferred to look the other way.* dinary rendition” was proposed. While White House Counsel
Lloyd Cutler had his doubts, Gore had none. “That’s a no brainer,”
It was precisely to avoid the kind of moral di- Clarke says Gore declared, “of course it’s a violation of interna-
lemma posed by rendition that Gitmo had been cre- tional law. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

Commentary 23

No matter. It was two years later, and Justice 732, was released from Gitmo in November 2007 after
Anthony Kennedy didn’t like what he was seeing, and being in the compound nearly six years. He returned to
he changed the rules. The door was now wide open for Yemen, and today is the number-two man in al Qaeda’s
considering Gitmo detainee cases in the U.S. courts. branch there. Abdullah Salih al-Ajmi was transferred
In November, shortly after Obama’s election, a federal to Kuwait in 2005, then vanished into Syria, and was
judge ruled that five of the six defendants named in killed with two accomplices in a 2008 suicide bombing
Boumediene were being held unlawfully and would in Mosul, Iraq that also claimed the lives of 13 Iraqi
have to be either moved from Gitmo or set free. policemen.
“Liberty and security can be reconciled,” Another former Afghani detainee, Abdullah Mu-
declared Kennedy in his majority decision in Bou- hammad, was fitted with a modern prosthesis for his
mediene—thus inaugurating a grand and reckless missing leg during his stay at Gitmo. He convinced his
experiment. How that reconciliation was going to annual review board that he wasn’t a terrorist fanatic,
work in practice will be the fundamental issue in the and it turned him loose. Abdullah Muhammad is now
post-Gitmo era. being sought for involvement in the bombing of the Is-
lamabad Marriott in 2006, and is still walking around

Now SO WHAT will happen if detain-
ees enter the criminal justice
on the artificial leg he was given by his Gitmo captors.
It is unprecedented for a nation unilaterally

What? system inside the United States
and end up being released? The
to release enemy combatants during wartime, as the
United States has done at Gitmo, and for obvious
record of those who have been released from Gitmo is reasons. Nearly all the remaining Gitmo detainees are
not an encouraging one for anyone who claims they trained in the use of heavy weapons, mortars, bomb
want to protect America from terrorists. making, hostage taking, and psy-ops against their cap-
By February 2006, 240 detainees had been let tors. They will pose a serious risk wherever they finally
go from Gitmo, following the work of the Combat- end up.
ant Status Review Tribunals established in 2004. By Yet the question of where to put them drags on,
while the equally dangerous
c c detainees at Bagram Air Force
Base in Afghanistan may end
up getting the same rights of
Eighteen former detainees habeas corpus if the Supreme
have returned to the Court’s ruling in Boumediene
is applied across the board.
battlefield, and another 43 This has led the Obama
are listed as “suspected” of administration to ponder the
question of what to do with
going back to the fight. detainees who do get released
One killed a judge in by the courts. In a recent trip
to Germany, Attorney General
Afghanistan. Eric Holder tried to convince
European law authorities to
take charge of some of the
March 2007, the total number had risen to 390. Some thirty the president intends to release from Gitmo. The
were released outright; more were transferred to their response was less than encouraging.
home countries for incarceration (although that does In the end, at least some may end up being set
not mean that they remained in prison for very long). free here. Obama’s new National Intelligence Director,
The Pentagon has confirmed that 18 former Admiral Dennis Blair, has speculated that they might
detainees have returned to the battlefield, with an- have to receive civilian housing, job training, and even
other 43 listed as “suspected” of going back to the fight, government checks while living here.
meaning final confirmation is all but impossible. One And what of Michael Ratner’s original clients, the
released detainee killed a judge in Afghanistan; an- so-called Tipton Three? They are now free in Britain.
other took over leadership of an al-Qaeda-linked radi- Two of them, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed, appeared
cal group in Pakistan. Al-Shihiri, formerly Prisoner on the BBC television program Lie Lab. Rasul refused


to take a lie detector test on whether his stories about and by publicly contemplating legal action against for-
abuse at Gitmo were true, and Ahmed allowed that his mer Bush officials, he is able to devalue George Bush’s
earlier story of being an innocent tourist in Afghanistan accomplishment in making us safe after 9/11. This
before the American invasion was false. He admitted to helps burnish Obama’s own reputation—while implic-
having attended an al-Qaeda training camp, and being itly paying obeisance to Ratner, Soros, and others who
trained to use an AK-47 and other heavier weapons. have distorted American public perception of why and
However, Ahmed suffered no embarrassment for his how the Bush administration fought the war on terror
belated disclosure. He is currently a spokesman for Am- in the way it did.
nesty International in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Gitmo remains open, the unwanted
orphan of the war on terror. Attacks on guards at

The RATNER and his col-
leagues have done
Gitmo continue as before, sometimes as many as ten
per week. However, human-rights groups and lawyers

Unwanted their job magnifi-
cently. Who, living in
are just getting warmed up. They are now laying the
ground for a similar legal assault on the American

Orphan the weeks after 9/11
when the Center for
detention center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghani-
stan, which they call Gitmo with a different zip code.
Constitutional Rights began its campaign against Git- On April 15, detainee Muhammad al-Qahtani
mo, could have predicted that in less than eight years, told al-Jazeera that he had been quietly sitting in his
an American administration would be contemplating cell when soldiers burst into his room with a thick
turning unrepentant terrorists loose on the street or rubber or plastic baton. “They beat me with it. They
contemplating putting those who incarcerated them emptied two canisters of tear gas on me,” he said, and
on trial? claimed that after all this, they beat him again.
The final verdict on Gitmo rests on whether It is, of course, a lie. But it is of a piece with the
one believes the claims of the terrorists and their al- entire Gitmo myth, which was constructed to ruin
lies, or the evidence presented by the Pentagon and the Bush administration and blacken the reputation
other official investigators. Where President Obama of the United States. The careful construction of this
stands on this question is still unclear. At times, he has myth caused America to turn on itself in the midst of a
shown pragmatism in conducting “the war on terror” still desperate struggle against Islamist terrorism. The
(although he has banished the term from the official consequences of this sea change in opinion may turn
lexicon). At other times, he has been willing to use anti- out to be measured not in political gains and losses
American sentiment to his own advantage. By feeding by our major parties but in a revival of the fortunes of
the media with selective leaks of interrogation memos America’s foes. q

Commentary 25

The Gitmo Myth And The Torture Canard

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