The Guantánamo Nightmare

The more than 700 confidential military documents about the terrorist suspects imprisoned at the American base at Guantánamo in Cuba, which were recently divulged by WikiLeaks and The New York Times, form the fourth set of confidential U.S. government papers made public in the past year. The new battle makes it clear that the greatest world power’s inability to protect its secrets only adds to its inability to distinguish who is who among the presumed agents of its number one enemy — the terrorist network al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden.

Al-Qaida’s attacks on the country on Sept. 11, 2011, were the origin of the transformation of Guantánamo into a prison sui generis, which affronts the sacred American rights of liberty and fails to be an effective tool for confronting the homicidal fundamentalist menace. We already know the routines of violence, humiliation and removal of legal protections that befell the prisoners at the American enclave in Cuba. It was also known that no small number of the prisoners, after capture, were clandestinely taken to other countries to be tortured — and from there, to Guantánamo.

But no one knew the surrealism that reigned in what has become “an enduring American institution,” as The New York Times said in allusion to the desistence of President Barack Obama to end what Washington delicately calls a “detention center,” one of his strongest campaign promises. The leaked papers are nearly all “assessment reports,” written between February 2002 and January 2009, from the Bush administration. There are files on 759 of the 779 detainees who passed through the camp during this period, including a 14-year-old boy and a senile old man of 89 years.

Of at least 150 enemy combatants, none of their custodians could establish a link between them and al-Qaida or the Taliban. They ended up in Guantánamo for unbelievable reasons, such as being confused by homonyms or accused of terrorist acts by the actual perpetrators, without their versions of their stories being heard. Nevertheless, years passed until they were finally returned to their countries of origin. A Sudanese filmmaker who worked for Al-Jazeera television spent six years responding to questions about training programs, equipment and the station’s news coverage. He was released in 2008 (and returned to employment).

One hundred seventy-two suspects remain in the base, the majority of whom are considered “high risk.” However, according to the released documents, around 200 of the 600 suspects released had the same classification. None of them, whether innocent or guilty, could be taken to a criminal tribunal, due to the fragility of the evidence brought against them and the circumstances of their confessions. Like the best-known of the detainees, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the confessed chief organizer of Sept. 11, they will be judged by a military court; the government avoided bringing him before a tribunal in Manhattan, where the Twin Towers stood until they were hit that terrible morning by airplanes via that band of suicidal terrorists.

Much of what the prisoner’s “assessment reports” consist of are what the detainees said to a handful of others. Moreover, members of intelligence services of 10 countries — all Arab or Muslim countries, save for Russia and China — were in Guantánamo to interrogate their nationals. Often, it was later found that what the prisoners said to these intelligence leaders didn’t necessarily agree with what they said to the Americans. What is believable is the portrait of daily degradation on the base, the breathable tension in the air, the vows of revenge and retribution. This has hardly changed with the advent of Obama.

It’s not clear what Obama can do against the attacks of the virulent Republican opposition in order to get rid of this nightmare’s legacy, which continues to damage the image of the U.S. like no other single issue. And all for what? As the London daily The Guardian summarized the situation: “The more that is revealed about Guantánamo, the worse it looks as a way of responding to terrorism. It was a symbol of vengeance, not a system of justice.”