Journey to Guantánamo
I went to the American penal colony in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. I was there as a journalist, to cover pre-trial motion hearings for The Nation, and I’m still absorbing the strangeness of the place and the functions of the military commission. The essay I composed about the experience is the cover story in the July 25/August 1, 2022 issue of The Nation, and my essay is accompanied by two pages of artwork (curated by Erin L. Thompson) by those held or once held at Guantánamo. I hope you’ll check it all out.
If it’s your first visit to Guantánamo Bay, you might be forgiven for expecting the world’s most notorious prison site to look more like a garrisoned penal colony than a sleepy suburb in Southern California. But when you realize that the actual detention facility is tucked away in a far corner of this 45-square-mile naval base, and that what you can and cannot see will be determined almost completely by the same US government that invited you to observe the military commissions here, you arrive at the conclusion that your week on this occupied spit of Cuban territory will probably be a little strange.
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If you believed in omens and premonitions, you might have been able to see something like this coming. In that case, you probably would have considered it meaningful rather than just odd that while you and the rest of the small media crew were waiting to be admitted to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland at 6 AM to board a charter flight to Guantánamo, the large-screen television in the waiting room was, for reasons unknown to you, playing the movie The Matrix.
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If it’s your first visit to Guantánamo as a member of the media, you will be told of the requirement that you must display your media credentials wherever you go. After you arrive on the base, you will notice that the members of the media are the only people wearing anything around their necks, making everyone stare at your chest and repeatedly ask you who you work for. Several days later, when you find yourself searching for something to eat at the naval base’s bowling alley, a man in civilian clothes who looks to be a member of the military will approach you and ask, “Does it make you feel bad that nobody wants to talk to you because of that thing around your neck?” To which you respond, “Are you instructed not to talk to members of the media?” After which he will respond with a half smile, “I’m not saying, but I’m saying.”
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Even if it’s your first visit to Guantánamo, you will know that since January 11, 2002, the US government has imprisoned some 780 Muslim men and boys here (the youngest prisoner at Guantánamo was 13 years old). You will have read a 2006 study of the first 571 detainees, which found that 86 percent of them were not captured by US troops but were handed over to coalition forces in Afghanistan or Iraq in a cynical exchange for monetary bounties. You will also know that of the 780 total detainees, more than 730 have been released, the vast majority never having been charged with any crime. At the time of your visit, you will read that 38 men remain at Guantánamo (though the number is now 36, as one man, Sufiyan Barhoumi, was recently repatriated to Algeria and another, Assadullah Haroon Gul, was returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan). And you will know that of those 38 (now 36), 19 are being detained even though they have been cleared for release by the US government. Your wonder at this fact will be superseded by the knowledge that an additional five men are being kept in indefinite detention because the US government says they are still too dangerous to be released, but the government has not charged any of them with a crime. And you will know that 10 men are currently facing charges in a military commission system established to try “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” as the Military Commissions Act of 2009 refers to the men. You’ve come to observe the pretrial-motion hearings for one of these 10 men.
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“What exactly is a military commission?” you will ask yourself before leaving for Guantánamo. You will read on the website of the Office of Military Commissions that they “are a form of military tribunal convened to try individuals for unlawful conduct associated with war.” You will see, on this website, how the United States has used versions of military commissions during or after the Revolutionary War, the Mexican-American War, the US Civil War, and World Wars I and II. The aim of this list, you believe, is to illustrate a legal legacy of military commissions, but all it shows you, really, is that, for a young country, the United States has a long history of warfare.
You will also recall an oft-repeated sentence from Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States during the Nuremberg trials in 1945: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” And you will note that the Nuremberg trials took 10 months to complete.
The case you are here to witness has been in pretrial-motion hearings for eight years.
You can read the rest here.