Guantanamo and the H-Blocks - learning the wrong lessons from the history of the hunger strik.
“I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell,” says Omar Deghayes, a British refugee and Guantanamo Bay prisoner. “I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?”
This magazine goes to press on the 46th day of the Guantanamo hungerstrike. In 1981, in Belfast, Bobby Sands and nine other members of the IRA starved themselves to death. British policy mandated internment without trial, treating uncharged prisoners as criminals. The prisoners insisted the British treat them as prisoners of war. The first prisoner died after 46 days without food. Ten died before the British government accepted that internment was not just a betrayal of democratic principles; it was the most persuasive recruiting sergeant the IRA ever had.
How soon these lessons are forgotten. Three and a half years of internment without trial in Guantanamo, and any U.S. claim to be the standard bearer of the rule of law has already dissolved.
But there are two important distinctions between the experience of Bobby Sands and Omar Deghayes: The U.S. military has insisted on secrecy regarding Guantanamo Bay, and the U.S. media has been compliant in its apathy. Despite the traditional British hostility to free speech, every inch of Bobby Sands’ decline was broadcast live. In contrast, nothing we lawyers learn from our Guantanamo clients can be revealed until it passes the U.S. government censors. Thus, fourteen days passed before the public even knew there was a hungerstrike in Guantanamo Bay, and the military has been allowed to dissemble on the details since.
From its inception, Guantanamo has relied on a soldier-speak that is replete with half-truths and distortions. In 2002, there was a ripple of concern at the number of Guantanamo detainees trying to take their own lives. The military then announced that suicide attempts had radically declined. It took a foreign journalist to expose the truth: The very word ‘suicide’ had been replaced by the authorities with the term ‘Manipulative Self-Injurious Behavior’ (SIBS) -- and there were still plenty of SIBS. The military was lying by semantics.
Similar dissimulation is taking place around the Guantanamo hungerstrike, which began on June 28th. It was suspended on July 28th, when the military promised various concessions, terrified at the public relations prospect of having six prisoners in hospital within forty-eight hours of death. The strike started again on August 11th, because the detainees concluded that the military had broken its promises.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has insisted that the Guantanamo prisoners are being treated “consistent” with the Geneva Conventions. To end their hungerstrike, the detainees ask simply that they be treated “consistent with the Geneva Conventions”. If Rumsfeld is telling the truth, why would the prisoners need to starve themselves to death?
The Conventions mandate that, unless duly convicted of a crime, “prisoners of war may not be held in close confinement. . . .” In Camp V, each detainee is held in a Supermax solitary cell, hermetically sealed from all human contact, allowed out for just one hour each week. The detainees there include juveniles and even Sami Al Laithi, held there for six months in his wheelchair even after being found innocent by the military’s own biased tribunals.
The Conventions forbid coercive interrogations. The prisoners reasonably objected when, on August 5th, Hisham Sliti had a mini-refrigerator thrown at him by the interrogator nicknamed ‘King Kong’.
The Conventions guarantee the free exercise of religion. So why, the detainees demand, have they not been allowed to meet with an Imam for three years? Why is collective prayer curtailed? And why was a Yemeni prisoner recently beaten and his Qur’an trampled because he asked to finish his prayers before responding to a guard’s demand?
The conclusion is inescapable: The detainees have a series of valid complaints, and Rumsfeld is not telling the truth.
Governments did learn one lesson from Bobby Sands: He is famous because he died. The U.S. military are determined not to allow its prisoners to make this ultimate, tragic political statement. Thus, the military admits to force-feeding prisoners. Last week its spin doctors changed the phrase to ‘assisted feeding’, another attempt to hide the truth of what is really going on. In the July hunger strike, the prisoners tore the needles out of their arms to prevent drip-feeding, so the military is now using nose tubes. They assure us that none of the 21 people in hospital will be able to kill himself.
But someone committed to self-starvation could easily remove such a tube, if he had any freedom of movement. So we can surmise that there is a line of 21 Guantanamo hospital beds, each with a prisoner tight in four-point restraints. His head must be strapped down immobile, and forcible sedation seems probable. Hardly the image evoked by the term “assisted feeding.”
Presumably, in a secret prison, the military can keep this up for weeks. But this will only postpone the Guantanamo Titanic’s inevitable encounter with its public relations iceberg. Three years of despair will not be dissolved in the contents of a drip-feeding tube.
The only solution is for the military to stop hiding its hypocrisy behind a smokescreen of secrecy and semantics. The U.S. is a far better country than the Guantanamo experiment would have the world believe. It signed the Geneva Conventions more than 50 years ago. Surely Rumsfeld has had enough time to work out how to apply them.
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