I concede that there are a handful of detainees in Gitmo that are die-hard and unrepentant terrorists who deserve the unmitigated impact of the law. As I have indicated in a previous article, the majority of the detainees are innocent individuals who, if due process was granted, could have been freed years ago. My presumption of innocence is grounded in the simple fact that up until this moment, the Pentagon fails to bring charges against them. The Pentagon and the Gitmo military commanders cringe at the thought that these presumably innocent detainees could possibly be set free. “If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off?” asks Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes. It is becoming imperative that they impose the restrictive regulations necessary to grant military prosecutors and judges the upper hand and shield the actions of Gitmo jailers and interrogators from public scrutiny. If they could erase the memories of the detainees to prevent them from relating to the world the gratuitous brutality they have endured in Guantanamo, they would do so.
(Copyright Fernando Bottero)
Today, Gitmo authorities attempted just that; they censored the heart churning drawings of a detainee depicting himself as a skeleton stretched on a gurney, his head double strapped, a hose forcefully slithered through his nose and into his body. It is the force-feeding practice the Gitmo jailers have been practicing. It is standard operating procedure (SOP) vis-à-vis hunger strikers in Guantanamo. The drawings were penciled by no other than the Sudanese Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami Al-Haj who has been on a hunger strike for 432 days.
Guantanamo detention center justifies this abrogation of the law by the fact that al-Qaeda trains its operatives to allege inhumane treatment. Again, Sami Al-Haj has not been charged with anything yet. But the presumption of guilt, just like the force feeding, is a standard practice in Gitmo. I wonder if the Gitmo leadership just lounges around under those royal palm trees brainstorming about the most efficient ways to further entrench international contempt of the U.S and squander the remainder of its reputation.
Unfortunately, such demarche is not typical of Guantanamo, the Pentagon, or the White House. It is an institutional mindset in the U.S. This refusal to be reminded of the atrocities (Nagasaki and Hiroshima, My Lai, Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo to cite a few) the administration orchestrated in the name of its constituents stems from a Puritan culture that strives to be portrayed as just, compassionate, and upholding those unalienable rights with which the Creator endowed Man. When Fernando Bottero, the renowned Colombian painter and sculptor whose work was sought by galleries and museums in the U.S. and elsewhere, produced eighty-two paintings as a testimonial to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, he couldn’t find a single American Museum to display them until the last quarter of 2007.
Ahmed T. B. Copyright © 2008
