GUANTÁNAMO

Reviewed 11/05/2013

Guantánamo, by David Rose

Access to this book courtesy of the

GUANTÁNAMO The War on Human Rights David Rose New York: The New Press, November 2004				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-1-56584-957-0
ISBN-10 1-56584-957-4	160pp.	HC	$21.95

In early September 2001, the three men from Tipton in England had gone to Pakistan to attend a wedding. One, Asif Iqbal, was to be married; his two friends Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed travelled with him. Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul planned to attend a computer class after the wedding because it cost less than similar classes in England. However, in October they made the mistake of crossing into Afghanistan, seeing that land was about to be plunged into war. They had some naive idea of rendering humanitarian aid. Instead, they were trapped in the city of Kunduz, under bombardment by Northern Alliance forces of General Rashid Dostum, rounded up and after arduous1 treatment shipped to Guantánamo as "unlawful combatants." For the long airplane journey they were handcuffed and shackled, with gloves taped over their hands. They wore black-lensed goggles, headphones, and surgical masks.

The prisoners, said General Richard E. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had had to be restrained in this fashion because they were so dangerous and bent on destruction that given half a chance, they "would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down."

– Page 2

Many books have been written about the cascade of American injustices at Guantánamo. This is one of the earliest. It provides excruciating detail of the brutal treatment routinely given all prisoners, regardless of whether they were held by Dostum, Americans, or even British. It documents the shamefully defective process of "screening" prisoners to determine who they were and how dangerous they might be. In fact, no screening was done; every captive was assumed to be "the worst of the worst" and treated accordingly. And it makes clear the reason for housing the prisoners at Guantánamo: the base was held by the GW Bush administration to be a legal black hole, where no standards applied.2

And administration officials clung steadfastly to that position, while just as adamantly claiming the detainees were not being mistreated.

"We will continue to treat them consistent with the principles of freedom, fairness and justice that our nation was founded on, the principles that they obviously abhor and which they sought to attack and destroy. Notwithstanding the isolated packets of international hyperventilation, we do not treat detainees in any manner other than a manner that is humane."

– Donald Rumsfeld,3 quoted on page 30

The importance of this book is twofold: It describes how detainees were treated, both via anecdotes and statistics; and it places their treatment in historical context, showing by cogent analysis the legal vacuity of Bush administration policy. It documents internal objections to that policy (for, while top-level officials "hung tough" on it, many at lower levels acknowledged the defects of the policy and understood that few of the detainees were guilty as charged.) Grammatical errors are few. The book's principal defect is that it has no index. I therefore recommend this excellent book and, because it is one of the first exposés of the abuses at Guantánamo, I consider it a keeper.

"How could an American administration have contemplated and executed such actions, and in so doing, as we have seen, turn its back on the very philosophies that informed the genesis of the nation? The answer has to be that Guantánamo reflects other battles being fought for the soul and direction of American society, deep conflicts that have been aptly described as a "culture war." On the one hand are the secular and constitutional principles of the American republic. On the other is the Christian authoritarianism of Boykin, Ashcroft, and Bush, an exceptionalism that for the rest of the world means only the justice of theocratic American might, in some senses a mirror image of the millenarian obscurantism espoused by Osama bin Laden in his mysterious Asian cave."

– Page 159

1 I use the term "arduous" euphemistically. These three men, along with countless others, endured what Rose aptly calls a living hell, and he quotes the prisoners' graphic descriptions of it. Conditions following their transfer to U.S. command were better only in the sense that they were not inherently lethal.

2 A Pentagon official admitted as much to the author in January 2004. (See page 22.) In fact the Geneva Conventions do provide for declaring captives to be "unlawful combatants" — but each and every one must be given a separate hearing; it cannot lawfully be done by fiat. The author notes that during the 1991 Gulf War our military held 1,196 such hearings. (See pages 26-27.) And there is provision for a member state to repudiate the Conventions, but this requires one year's advance notice, and it cannot be done during a conflict (pages 29-30.)

3 Rumsfeld's hypocrisy is revealed on page 102.

Errata for Guantánamo