[Ppnews] The Two-Guantanamo Solution

Sun Apr 18 19:54:15 EDT 2010

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, The Two-Guantanamo Solution

By Karen J. Greenberg
Posted on April 18, 2010, Printed on April 18, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175234/

It all began in Afghanistan (the War on Terror, 
of course).  It was there as well that, in late 
2001, the Bush administration first 
"<http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jun/09/world/fg-prison9>took 
the gloves off," a phrase its top officials then 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/63903/Danner_Bush%27s_state_of_exception>loved 
to use.  So the first torture and abuse of 
prisoners, including the 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29824-2004Dec2?language=printer>use 
of dogs to intimidate, took place there and only 
then migrated to Guantanamo in Cuba and Abu 
Ghraib in Iraq.  By 2004, the U.S. was 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2303/the_bush_administration_s_afghan_spring>already 
operating approximately two dozen off-the-grid 
prisons in Afghanistan and a 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/mar/19/terrorism.afghanistan>report 
in the British Guardian could speak of the U.S. 
prison system there as “the hub of a global 
network of detention centers.” It included a 
notorious CIA-run secret Afghan prison nicknamed 
“the Salt Pit.” The first 
<http://www.truthout.org/062509A>killing of 
prisoners by Americans occurred at our prison at 
Bagram Air Base, the huge former Soviet base that 
became a focus of American military 
activities.  One of the nastier spots on the 
planet for many years, Bagram was, as Karen 
Greenberg, author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195371887/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The 
Least Worst Place, Guantanamo's First 100 Days, 
has termed it, 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175042/karen_greenberg_the_missing_prison>“the 
missing prison” (at a time when all attention was 
focused on Guantanamo).  It remains George W. 
Bush’s unmentioned living legacy to Barack Obama.

Bagram itself theoretically cleaned up its act -- 
with $60 million 
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125832165575649413.html>invested 
in a full-scale facelift in 2009 and so, as Anand 
Gopal 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175197/tomgram:_anand_gopal,_afraid_of_the_dark_in_afghanistan/>reported 
at TomDispatch, “the mistreatment of prisoners 
[in Afghanistan] began to shift to the 
little-noticed Field Detention Sites,” a series 
of prison “holding areas” on U.S. military bases 
around the country.  To this day, the U.S. still 
operates a remarkably extensive, essentially 
off-the-grid prison system there.  It’s 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/15/terror-suspects-afghanistan-bagram>not 
completely clear who is in all of these prisons, 
and reports are not encouraging.  The BBC, for 
instance, recently found nine witnesses it 
considered credible who were ready to testify to 
abuse -- in the period since Barack Obama entered 
the Oval Office -- at a secret prison 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8621973.stm>nicknamed 
“the Black Hole,” also at Bagram.  (“The U.S. 
military has denied the existence of a secret 
detention site and promised to look into allegations.”)

Even more ominously, the first reports have 
appeared in the U.S. press indicating that the 
Obama administration may once again actually 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/21/world/la-fg-afghan-prison21-2010mar21>expand 
the use of Bagram to include the interrogation 
and incarceration for indefinite periods of new 
prisoners, wherever taken, in the Global War on 
Terror, whatever it may now be called, and is 
actually 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-detention16-2010apr16,0,5791392.story>drawing 
up classified guidelines to that effect.  As 
Greenberg, executive director of the Center on 
Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and a 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/172761/karen_greenberg_gitmo_decorum>TomDispatch 
regular, indicates, Bagram could turn out to be 
only one of two future American 
Guantanamos.  Yes, we can!  (By the way, check 
out the latest TomCast audio interview in which 
Greenberg discusses the quagmire of U.S. 
detention practices by clicking 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/04/gitmo-20.html>here 
or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, 
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817>here.) 
Tom

Obama’s “Remainees”
Will Not One But Two Guantanamos Define the American Future?
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/karengreenberg>Karen J. Greenberg

On his first day in office, President Barack 
Obama 
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/closureofguantanamodetentionfacilities/>promised 
that he would close the Bush-era prison at 
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “as soon as practicable” 
and “no later than one year from the date of this 
order.” The announcement was met with relief, 
even joy, by those, like me, who had opposed the 
very existence of Guantanamo on the grounds that 
it represented a legal black hole where the 
distinction between guilt and innocence had been 
obliterated, respect for the rule of law was 
mocked, and the rights of prisoners were 
dismissed out of hand. We should have known better.

By now, it’s painfully obvious that the 
rejoicing, like the president’s can-do optimism, 
was wildly premature. To the dismay of many, that 
year milestone passed, barely noticed, months 
ago.  As yet there is no sign that the notorious 
eight-year-old detention facility is close to a 
shut down.  Worse yet, there is evidence that, 
when it finally is closed, it will be replaced by 
two Guantanamos -- one in Illinois and the other 
in Afghanistan.  With that, this president will 
have committed himself in a new way to the 
previous president’s “long war” and the illegal 
principles on which it floundered, especially the 
idea of “preventive detention.”

Guantanamo in Illinois

For those who have been following events at 
Guantanamo for years, perhaps this should have 
come as no surprise. We knew just how difficult 
it would be to walk the system backwards toward 
extinction, as did many of the former 
lawyer-critics of Guantanamo who joined the Obama 
administration.  The fact is: once a distorted 
system has been set in stone, the only way to 
correct it is to end the distortion that started it: indefinite detention.

As of today, here’s the Guantanamo situation and 
its obdurate math.   One hundred eighty-three 
detainees 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/24/1544932/switzerland-resettles-2-brothers.html>remain 
incarcerated there.  Perhaps we should call them 
“remainees.” 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012104936.html>According 
to the estimates of the Guantanamo Detainee 
Review Task Force set up by Attorney General Eric 
Holder, about half of them will be released 
sooner or later and returned to their homelands 
or handed over to other “host” countries.  They 
will then join approximately 600 former 
Guantanamo inmates released from custody since 
2002. Another thirty-five or so remainees will be 
put on trial, according to 
<http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/01/29/1452080/review-most-guantanamo-detainees.html>reports 
on the task force’s recommendations and, 
assumedly, convicted in either civilian courts or 
by military commissions. For the remaining 
<http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/292992-1>50 
or so -- those for whom evidence convincing 
enough for trial and conviction is absent, but 
who are nonetheless deemed by the president to 
constitute a threat to the nation -- the legal 
future is dim, even if the threat assessment 
which keeps them behind bars has nothing to do with normal American legalities.

Some of these long-term remainees may, in fact, 
have been jihadists at the time they were rounded 
up.  Given the years of incarceration and the 
conditions they experienced, many more of the 
remainees may have been radicalized in Guantanamo 
itself, and might now seek to harm the U.S. or 
its citizens.  In addition, half of them 
originally came from Yemen, a country unstable 
enough that, on return, some might indeed be 
recruited by forces intent on doing the U.S. 
harm.  Although, in defiance of the warnings of 
its right-wing critics, the Obama administration 
did return six remainees to Yemen at the end of 
2009, the Christmas Day bombing attempt by Umar 
Farouk Abdulmutallab only 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2009/1229/Yemen-ties-of-Northwest-bomber-Umar-Farouk-Abdulmutallab-test-Guantanamo-plans>ratcheted 
up concerns about possible radicalization and 
training there.  There have been no further transfers to Yemen since then.

So what is an administration that has made a firm 
promise and encountered an obstacle-laden, 
politically charged reality to do? If you take 
seriously the plans that this administration has 
been floating, the answer is simple: close down 
Guantanamo by putting in play two other 
Guantanamos (lacking the poisonous name) -- one 
on American soil and one in Afghanistan, one 
future-oriented and sure to prove problematic, 
the other reeking of past disasters.

At some future date, the Obama administration has 
<http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/15/gitmo.illinois/index.html>announced 
plans to move those Guantanamo detainees who are 
neither tried nor released to the 
still-to-be-refurbished Thomson Correctional 
Facility in Thomson, Illinois -- 
<http://www.prairie-advocate-news.com/12-30-09/thomsonprison12_30_09.html>“Gitmo 
North,” as it’s been dubbed by Senate minority 
leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).  Plans to relocate 
at least some detainees to a prison in the U.S. 
surfaced last summer. The idea has since 
encountered Congressional resistance on the 
grounds of safety and security, heightened by 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175206/tomgram:_engelhardt,_fear_inc.__>outsized 
American fears that such prisoners have Lex 
Luthor-like powers and that al-Qaeda has the 
capability to attack any non-military prison 
holding them.  The administration, however, is still pursuing the Thomson plan.

McConnell and other Republicans may be using the 
“Gitmo” label to stoke American fears of 
terrorism on our soil, but they are not wrong in 
another sense.  A jail holding uncharged and 
untried remainees for the foreseeable future -- 
or even a remainee who has been tried and 
acquitted -- will indeed be “Gitmo,” whatever 
it’s official name and whatever happens to the 
prison in Cuba. In July 2009, in fact, the 
strikingly un-American idea of a presidentially 
imposed post-acquittal detention was 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/07/AR2009070703332.html>first 
suggested by Jeh Johnson, the current General 
Counsel for the Department of Defense, as one 
possible fate for a dangerous detainee whom a 
deluded jury (or a jury deprived of 
torture-induced confessions) might free.  In this 
scenario, such a remainee, like those never 
brought to trial, would potentially remain under 
lock and key until the end of hostilities in the 
“long war,” itself imagined as at least a generational affair.

Guantanamo in Afghanistan

In other words, what’s being proposed is the 
moving of a (renamed) Guantanamo, body and soul, 
to the United States.  That’s already a dismal 
prospect, but hardly the end of the line when it 
comes to post-Guantanamo thinking for this 
administration.  In fact, a new idea has emerged 
recently.  Last month, 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/21/world/la-fg-afghan-prison21-2010mar21>according 
to the Los Angeles Times, the White House hinted 
that the administration was contemplating using 
the already existing prison at Bagram Air Base in 
Afghanistan as yet another replacement for 
Guantanamo -- apparently for housing future 
prisoners in what is no longer officially termed the Global War on Terror.

Were this to happen, it would be a squaring of 
the circle, a strange return to the origins of it 
all.  Bagram was, notoriously enough, the place 
where, in 2001-2002, many of the prisoners who 
ended up at Guantanamo were first held (and often 
badly mistreated).  Perhaps my mind has simply 
taken a cynical turn, but I can’t help wondering 
whether the administration might someday simply 
dump some of the Guantanamo remainees there as 
well.  Then, we would be grimly back where George 
W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began.  The 
“advantage” of Bagram, of course, is simple 
enough: prisoners on an American military base in 
distant Afghanistan might not be subject to the 
same levels of scrutiny or legal “meddling” (as 
the supporters of the Guantanamo process like to 
term it) as in Cuba or the United States -- all 
those habeas challenges and challenges to 
military commissions that have, in eight years, 
convicted only three detainees (only one of whom 
still remains in custody), and all those human rights concerns.

There are indications that, in considering the 
re-use of Bagram as a parking lot for “the worst 
of the worst,” Obama administration officials 
remain remarkably blind to the history they are 
threatening to repeat.  Evidently they don’t 
grasp the obvious parallels between Guantanamo 
and Bagram.  Nevertheless, the language they are 
wielding has begun to sound eerily 
familiar.  Last month, for instance, a senior 
Pentagon official was 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/21/world/la-fg-afghan-prison21-2010mar21>quoted 
saying that the idea of reinvigorating Bagram as 
a holding facility for such prisoners might not 
be the ideal solution, but was the “least bad” 
choice. How similar that sounds to the words 
former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld 
applied to Guantanamo Bay when he announced its 
opening in 2002. It was, he acknowledged almost 
apologetically, the 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195371887/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>“least 
worst place.”

If a two-prison solution were to go into effect, 
that would mean President Obama had fully 
accepted the Bush administration’s notion of a 
generational global battlefield against 
terror.  After all, that’s what underlay Gitmo 
from the beginning and that’s what would underlie 
a rejuvenated Bagram as well. In theory, there 
could be a workable solution lurking somewhere in 
all this murky planning, if it were undergirded 
with actual legal definitions; if, in the case of 
Thomson, the Illinois facility-to-be, the 
prisoners placed there were first charged, tried, 
and convicted; and if, in the case of Bagram, 
anyone placed there was declared a prisoner of 
war, or given some legally recognized status 
according to the laws of war or the Geneva 
Conventions. But as of now, it looks like both 
facilities will instead offer an endorsement of so-called preventive detention.

The administration’s disingenuousness on this 
point is overwhelming. On the one hand, we are 
told that the terms “war on terror” and “enemy 
combatants” are history and that Guantanamo will 
soon join them. But Guantanamo was never purely a 
place in Cuba. What made it so wrong was the 
system of indefinite detention that lay at its 
core and that continues to defy the rule of law 
as defined by the U.S. Constitution, U.S. 
military law, and the international conventions 
that this country has signed onto.

Closing Guantanamo does not simply mean emptying 
the prison cells at that naval base and throwing 
away the keys. It means ending the policy that 
has become synonymous with Guantanamo -- of 
incarcerating individuals without the need to 
prove their guilt, and without a clear and 
recognizable process for determining the grounds for their detention.

Faced with 
<http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=cqmidday-000003640508>opposition 
in Congress and in public sentiment generally, 
the Obama administration increasingly seems 
focused on ending not the conceptual nightmare we 
call Guantanamo, but the irritating problem that 
Guantanamo represents.  Unfortunately, as this 
administration will learn to its regret, there is 
no closing Guantanamo if preventive detention continues.

In reality, a two-Guantanamo policy is likely to 
prove an unwieldy disaster and will hardly lead 
the country out of the quagmire of incarceration 
that the Bush administration mired us in.  In the 
end, that quagmire is not legal (though the legal 
issues it raises are fundamental), nor political 
(though it may look that way from Capitol Hill): 
it’s psychological.  And there is only one way to 
escape from it: end once and for all the notion 
of preventive detention by placing firm and 
unbending confidence in our military, our 
intelligence agencies, and our system of justice 
to identify enemies, prosecute those whom they 
can, and abide by the laws of war for prisoners of war.

Perhaps it’s also time for us to accept life in a 
world of imperfect security. It may sound harsh, 
but not nearly as soul-defeating as the idea that 
not one, but two Guantanamos, will define the American future.

Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of the 
Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of 
Law, is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0195371887/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The 
Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, 
among other works. To listen to the latest 
TomCast audio interview in which Greenberg 
discusses the quagmire of U.S. detention 
practices, click 
<http://tomdispatch.blogspot.com/2010/04/gitmo-20.html>here 
or, if you prefer to download it to your iPod, 
<http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tomcast-from-tomdispatch-com/id357095817>here.

Copyright 2010 Karen J. Greenberg

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San Francisco, CA 94110

415 863-9977

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